Cascade
by Feonyx
Summary: Chapter Six: Ephraim falls prey to the sigil of undeath, Tana delivers the mightiest slap of all time, Franz and Ewan follow Duessel into Lagdou, and Saleh's madness reaches its catastrophically explosive peak. :FranzAmelia, EphraimTana:
1. Shadows Of Things To Come

**Cascade**

**Chapter One: Shadows Of Things To Come**

The great capital city of Grado was awash, drenched by a rainstorm that had been assaulting the city for three days, and was onto its fourth night. The street was a shallow canal, but so old that subsurface aqueducts had been built under it by some thoughtful emperor decades ago – ­­­the water sluiced off the rooftops like a waterfall, splashed onto the sidewalks, into the streets and down the drains to join some distant river. During the day, most people kept to the narrow shelter under the eaves, a corridor walled on one side by the buildings and on the other by a curtain of water.

Franz was in that space, and the unoccupied part of his mind was wondering about the people inside the tavern, the knights and civilians celebrating nothing in particular. Franz didn't drink, simply because he hated the flavours. Obviously that made for a memory without curious blank spaces and a lot fewer idiotic stunts to his name, but the poetry that had been put to wine sometimes made him wonder. An ancient philosopher had once said that wine was sunlight held together by water, and that sort of thing could make a paladin feel rather left out.

A second's further reflection convinced him that he didn't really care after all, since the taste of Amelia's lips pressed to his at that moment had all those poems matched and then some. She hummed a rippling note of contentment and pulled away, immediately saying "It's not that I care or anything, but they are eventually going to wonder where we went."

"You really think they'll notice?" Franz asked automatically, his mind on the warmth of her in his arms. "Forde's never learned _any_ of the Grado tavern songs, and you know how he can hold a crowd."

"We should at least send in a reconnaissance team. What do you think, knight-sergeant?"

"I'll take it into consideration, knight-sergeant," Franz agreed with a grin, and leaned in again.

"_AAAAIIIIIGGHHHH!_" The scream, unidentifiable as human or animal, let alone male or female, ripped through the rain-drummed streets like a brick through a picture window. The young knights spared only a moment for a pained glance at each other before they took off down the street at full speed, boots splashing.

"This had better be an armed robbery at _least_," Franz growled, the rain instantly soaking him from head to toe. Neither of them were armoured or armed, since this was supposed to be a night off, but swords were easy to come by in the former military Grado Empire, and after the months of training since the Gorgon incident back at Renais Castle, Amelia was deadly with anything that looked remotely like a lance. The only trouble was going to be finding the screamer to begin with; the city's winding streets were like an echo valley tied in a knot.

"Left or right?" he asked as they came to the intersection.

"Left, I think," said Amelia, skidding but not slipping on the wet cobblestones. "You take right, just in case."

"I'm not leaving–" Franz began to protest.

"Don't start."

"I'm going," he corrected himself, taking off down the other way. Say what you would about Franz's chivalrous ideas, but he was learning to accept that his sixteen-year-old sweetheart was capable of kicking his plate-mailed tail around the practice ring six times out of ten.

Amelia scanned the houses on either side as she went, looking for a telltale open door or lamp-lit room with struggling figures. For some reason, no one ever left a sign out for their rescuers. Just once she'd like to see a citizen in distress standing outside their house with a pair of torches, signalling to nearby heroes in semaphore, but no, they never thought ahead.

_Mind you_, she recalled, _I'm the one attempting to charge into danger without weaponry and all the protection afforded by a tunic and some good boots._

She did get a stroke of luck this time; only one house around the next corner had a front door hanging off its hinges and smoke billowing out of the window. Sprinting so fast she left a wake in the street, Amelia was only stopped by her grab at the doorframe – and the jolt of the scene inside, where a pair of sisters were huddled against the far wall, separated from her by a growing blaze. The strange thing was that they weren't staring at the flames, but the walls and the rippling shadows cast by raging firelight.

Compared to hostile wyvern riders, hordes of monsters, and that little episode with Fomortiis, the never-dying King of Demons, a house fire didn't have much to ward off Amelia. In fact, if not for furniture and carpets, it wouldn't have been a problem; the house was mostly stone. Nevertheless, she immediately moved in around one side, vaulted over a writing desk, and hefted one girl under each arm (Amelia was older than both of them combined, and the same probably went for weight), looking for an escape route.

What she _saw_ was the same thing that had so terrifyingly enthralled the girls, the dance of shadows around the room that became a throng of reaching hands from this angle, long clawed arms that stretched out of the darkness in a leap and dragged back out of sight to be replaced by more. In a puff of sparks a terrible face was emblazoned across the ceiling, nothing but a pair of malevolently enraged eyes and a gaping, fanged maw…

"Oh, _hell_ no," she decided, leaping onto the same desk again and using it as a boost over the expanding blaze. She charged out onto the street, letting the rain deal with any sparks that had managed to catch onto their clothes, and made sure the girls were unhurt before charging back in. Not to see if there was a cat in danger – in Amelia's experience, the self-serving little maniacs were usually the first ones off the scene – but because the timber-and-thatch village of Silva had a certain tradition when it came to fires.

The only things burning in the room so far were a large broken table, already mostly gone, and a rug that would eventually lead it to the rest of the furniture. The knight paused for just a second, weighing the sacrifice, the gains, and the truly awful pattern, and ripped down a window curtain. Wrapping it around her hands, she rolled the remains of the carpet over the flaming debris and hauled it outside into the street.

The rain sizzled, sending up a thick plume of steam and smoke even as she ran back in to gather as many burning remnants as possible. Amelia kept her eyes on the floor the whole time, and insisted to herself that she was only ducking to keep out of the smoke, and not away from whatever shape might be on the ceiling. It was only a matter of minutes later that the last embers were soaking in the street, and Amelia was directing the children to open all the windows of their house and then wait with their neighbours.

She went back to find Franz, slicking her wet hair back and starting to shiver – the autumn wind was one thing when you weren't soaked to the bone, but now she was content to tell someone higher-ranked about the fire and get back to the castle barracks. He was easy to spot, and not just because the streets were deserted; he was the only person she knew of who could seem to gallop without a horse, and he looked cheerful in spite of the storm.

"Tough luck," he said, shaking his head with a spray of raindrops. "You'll probably get the next one."

"…What?" She was still trying to pretend that she hadn't noticed anything other than a freak fire. "You found someone?"

"Six of 'em," the paladin reported. "Four thieves after a merchant couple."

"Are you going for backup?" she asked.

For a moment, they just stared at each other as the rain roared, and then both burst out laughing. It went on for a while.

"Oh… oh, wow… hehehe… but seriously – no, seriously, they should be able to walk again in a couple of days," said Franz, when he caught his breath. "Why, you see anything unusual?"

"House fire, nothing serious," Amelia replied. "I want to let Forde or Kyle know, and hopefully someone will know where the kids' parents are." It was far too late to bother with dodging the storm, so they started down the middle of the street, back toward the tavern. The winds were picking up, and a cold gale turned the rain horizontal for a moment. "And then I think a thick blanket and a smaller fire in the barracks is going to be really central to the evening."

Franz smoothly hooked his arm through hers. "Oh, totally."

* * *

Closing the door with a soft click, Duessel the Obsidian sighed again, shook his head, and generally made it clear to the universe at large that in _his_ day they wouldn't have stood for such things. He returned to his long walk through the castle with little hesitation; he had been walking Grado Keep for more than thirty years, from his first days as a messenger-squire. He had walked the whole route with his eyes closed more than once, just by feel and the memory in the soles of his feet and on the back of his eyelids.

Memories of days that would never be seen again.

Righteous Selena and indomitable Glen, wise Vigarde and idealistic young Lyon, too many lieutenants and brave knights, too many loyal citizens and innocent peasants… all lost, but burning too brightly in his recollections to be forgotten for even a moment. Too many times, even in just recent days, he had thought of some plan for restoring an outlying village, or an impossible, mind-bending riddle, and even started looking for Glen and Selena before he remembered that he could open a hundred thousand doors and they would never be on the other side.

But Grado still stood, and it was his responsibility as the last of the Imperial Three to see it returned to glory. He owed it to Selena and Glen, who had no more time available to them. But he would not forget, had no interest in forgetting. This life was borrowed time now, not a gift or luck. He did not belong in this new world, but would go on as long as necessary, as long as he could have his solitude…

"General Duessel," said a quiet voice behind him. The Obsidian was quiet for a moment before relenting to reality.

"Your Majesty," he replied, pivoting and standing to attention.

"That's probably stretching things, this late at night," said King Ephraim, surveying the greatknight. "Especially since you've known me since I was about as tall as your knees."

"I will show you the respect due to the ruler of Grado, regardless of other conditions," said Duessel.

"Throwing you in the stockades is still an option," Ephraim murmured, looking dissatisfied. "Look, General, I know you don't want me here, and I don't blame you for any part of it."

"It was the unanimous vote of the monarchs that you be made emperor, and I would rather fight all the beasts of Lagdou than go against Frelia, Jehanna, Rausten, Carcino, and, not least of all, your sister. That said, I can think of no better choice than yourself," Duessel stated.

"As much as that means to me, what I meant is that you want Vigarde or Lyon in my place, and I know it. And you've been my teacher for, what, eleven years? I like honesty more than formality."

Duessel relaxed his stance somewhat, unfolded his hands from behind his back and instead crossed them with mock sternness. "What do you want, Ephraim? I was busy."

The king-by-royal-committee began to laugh, but quickly stifled it for fear of waking any of the knights in the barracks around them. "That's much better, at least when there aren't any diplomats around. Something _is_ on my mind, but I'm more curious why you're still up."

"I like to make the rounds after dark," said Duessel. "It does me good to see warriors at peace. And, of course, I can keep track of the younger knights." He nodded at a door down the hall, the one he had shut himself not long ago. "Do you know why your sister hasn't imposed any discipline on those two? They're asleep in the common room."

Ephraim's gaze intensified into the beginnings of a glare. "_Together?_" He spun and would have marched down the hall with an aura of overwhelming royal prominence if Duessel hadn't laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.

"At opposite ends of the sofa in front of the fire, milord. When last I looked, Franz was using his head as a pillow for a book." Ephraim settled a little; if kings had hackles, his would have smoothed out again. "Now, they weren't even on duty tonight and I understand up to a dozen people may owe them their lives, but this, this _fraternisation_, is a destabilising force. They necessarily unbalance any unit we might try to put them into."

"Knights-Sergeant Amelia and Franz are on loan from Eirika," Ephraim reminded his general. "If she doesn't object, then it's no business of ours to interfere with. Besides, can you really say it's the first time you've ever seen… '_fraternisation'_ like that?"

"I am being mocked," Duessel stated.

"By a king, no less," Ephraim added.

"In my time, the subcommanders would be more likely to allow free border passes for barbarian invaders every Sunday than risk the unity of a contingent on–"

"Okay, I see where this is going. Well, you'll have to put up with them as well as me, then."

"Indeed," the greatknight agreed amicably. "And what business does Your Majesty have in the barracks this late at night?"

"Getting to know my castle, since I'll need to know it better than you do, soon enough," Ephraim replied. "And it's hard to get a night's sleep when the ordinary insurmountable problems of rebuilding a kingdom are playing tag-team with inexplicable occult forces."

"You don't strike me as the kind to lie awake at night, Ephraim," Duessel remarked. He remembered the king as a ridiculously intent student, the kind who always got right to sleep so that he could be up and lance-fighting again as soon as possible.

"I don't. I sit at my desk by candlelight until Tana's glare becomes so intense that it pins my arms behind my back and hurls me out of the room. She has this curious idea that people aren't meant to get anything done at night. Plus there are the… moods…"

"Those I am familiar with," said Duessel. He noticed the look Ephraim was giving him. "From my sister, I mean. She went from being my equal or better in sensibility, calculation–"

"Stodginess?"

"–To trying to concuss me with a rug," the Obsidian finished sharply.

"Well, how much damage could–"

"Rolled up? It was like stopping a battering ram with my nose."

"What do you think we should do?" Ephraim asked, changing the subject.

"You might want to remove all the rugs from your chambers."

"I was referring to the occult forces, General. Cormag tells me another two civilians have vanished, and we still don't have so much as a suspect? You and I have fought enough in the way of evil to know that this isn't an ordinary mystery; it's got Malicious Nether Forces written all over it in vile ancient runes. There aren't any answers where we'll think to look, and Knoll still hasn't come back." The pre-eminent druid of Grado had taken off into the wilderness some weeks earlier, saying he wanted to learn more about the secrets of nature and Anima.

"That brings the total up to more than two dozen, doesn't it?" Duessel asked rhetorically. "Well… perhaps we have two solutions in one, here. We can't afford to place entire units on the case, but your sister has lent us a pair of reputedly brilliant warriors who I'd rather not mix with the other soldiers."

"You recommend I assign two teenage knights to root out and contend with an unknown, shadowy threat? Have you no mercy?" Ephraim demanded.

"I hardly ever show mercy to unknown, shadowy threats." He was grinning, and Duessel grinned like a tiger with artillery support.

Ephraim rolled his eyes. "Neither of them has any experience with using or comprehending magic. And you've seen the sigils, so don't tell me magic isn't involved."

"You'd rather not call on the royal mages for this job?" Duessel asked.

"Until we learn more about who or what is behind twenty-seven people going missing in less than a month, I'd rather not call on anyone I don't know personally." Ephraim hesitated; Grado already had city guards, and he was supposed to be concerned with the whole country, not just a corner of the capital. This was supposed to be what he was good at, seeing the bigger picture. …Well, if Eirika could live and reign at the level of regular people, so could he. "All right, if we're going to give this more attention than the Watch have done so far, let's get it right. I happen to know we've already got a visitor coming; I'll put a messenger on the road to meet him. …Oh, and have someone glue down the carpets in all the imperial chambers."

"I doubt that will slow her down much, my liege."

"It'll give me time to duck."

* * *

"Where are you going?" Franz asked, more urgently than he meant to. The fire was out, buried in its own ashes, but the morning rain had thinned to a mere downpour, so enough light was coming through the clouds and the window to read by.

Amelia shrugged, also shifting her satchel into a more comfortable position. "Out. It's payday in Grado Keep, remember?"

"I was just waiting for you to wake up," the paladin volunteered, waving his book vaguely. "I can just bookmark this and–"

"Franz, you do realise we don't have to go _everywhere_ together," Amelia stated.

"…Well, yeah, of course. Yeah," he agreed, trying not to look like a deer in the lamplights.

"So one of us will find the other one later," she said, pausing by him on her way to the door. "Thanks for keeping my feet warm, though." She kissed him on the cheek and was out the door too quickly to notice Franz's raging blush.

The rain drummed on the window while Franz tried to figure out what had happened to the recruit who had been asleep on the sofa by the fire just moments ago.

"Okay," he said to the empty room. "That's fine." He didn't move, though eventually he remembered to put the book down. Franz's eyes scanned the room in long, slow sweeps. "Eventually, something is going to present itself." He watched the window curtains drifted lazily in some hidden draught for more than a minute before the thought finally arrived in his head. Smooth, chaotically graceful, rippling and curving through the only straight lines in all of nature…

Franz leapt to his feet, cast aside the marked book, and strode purposefully out into the hallway, immediately receiving a face full of bronze plating. For some reason, even coming up on two years since the second defeat of the Demon King, Forde was still irritatingly taller than his younger brother, and didn't mind everyone being totally aware of it, all the time.

"Hey, bro. I don't even want to know what you've been getting up to this time – the king wants to see you right away. The knight-sergeant, too; where is she?" asked Forde.

"Out," Franz echoed. "We both have the day off."

"Well _that's_ not going to last long. You must have screwed up…" Forde paused to savour the irony of his choice: "…Royally. King Ephraim has so little free time these days he's got the laundry crews ordered to wring it out of his clothes in case he missed any, and he's still leaving a spot in his schedule to chew you out. Lucky man."

"Why don't I outrank you?" Franz demanded of an unjust universe.

"Because I'm a subcommander of the Grado military with thirty knights following my orders with no consideration of life nor limb, whereas you have Magvel's most capable recruit and a loyal horse. Get moving, bro." With that, Forde trotted off down the hall, whistling a Renais bolero.

"Let any backstabbing rogues in through the back door, lately?" Franz called after him. Forde's pace faltered for a mere second, followed by a gesture over his shoulder in military handsign that translated as something like 'seize the brat with excessive force'.

Wondering what he could possibly have done to attract the king's attention, Franz made his way to the throne room. It had seen some remodelling since Ephraim assumed rule of Grado, and instead of massive pillar and open spaces with no actual purpose, the great hall was now the anteroom to the office of every major official in his court. All around the walls were the desks of their assistants, and the floor in the chamber's centre was a marble map of the empire, each city and village denoted by markers for each of its major unsolved problems.

Once it would have been impossible to enter the throne room unnoticed. Now, Franz slipped inside and approached the throne, hopscotching over the markers for the villages Glaswall, Gwyrrthing, and Silva, and could tell that not only was his presence expected, but totally boring to the many bookkeepers processing reports on every flat surface.

At the far end was Ephraim, who had turned the former throne dais into a kind of miniature base of operations. Seeing Franz coming, he waved off the nearby bureaucrats and beckoned the knight forward. "Sir Franz, you're very punctual."

"Thank you, King–"

"Whatever. Let me get to the point. How do you feel about mysterious disappearances, dark Magicks and probable serial killers?"

Franz blinked and replayed the question in his head, wondering if he had missed a trick question. "…I'd have to say I'm not in favour of them."

"Then today isn't your day, knight-sergeant."

Amelia held the dress against herself and checked her reflection in the shop's biggest mirror. She wasn't sure about the pink, and that was a polite way of saying that if any object had ever had more pink on it, then it had undoubtedly been the primal source of all pinkness, from which every other pink thing was a mere pale imitation. There was such a thing as too much pink, and this was it.

"Drat. You're sure you don't have the same look in any other colour? Red, maybe?" she asked.

"Oh, a little girl like you wouldn't want to walk around in red looking like that – people would start to get Ideas," said the shopkeeper, who had the gift of pronouncing meaningful capitals. Such people should be avoided.

"One of them already has Ideas, and so far it's been working out nicely," she muttered. "And what do you mean, 'little girl'? I'm a knight-sergeant. I've slain _dragons._ Well, fought dragons. Assisted others in slaying dragons. You know. I think it looked at me long enough for Dozla to put Garm in its back. 'Little girl'." Amelia looked at the shopkeeper, who wore a blank expression that probably meant she had stopped listening by now.

"Perhaps something with orange lace?" the shopkeeper suggested.

"You really have no idea what you're talking about," Amelia observed.

"If she wants red, give her red," said another voice from the shop's open door. "That armor she wears most of the time is _hot_."

"Ewan!" Amelia blurted, recognising the little mage, especially wearing his signature grin. "What are you doing here?"

"Just wandering down the street and I heard the sound of haranguing. It's a great spectator sport," he replied. "Seriously, go for something red."

"Well, orange was out of the question, but what are you doing in Grado to start with?"

"Oh," said Ewan. "Well, that's a longer story. Come on, and remember he'll probably be back to normal in a few days." She handed the Template of Pink back to the shopkeeper and followed Ewan out onto the street, where a horse had just trotted to a halt with another familiar figure riding on its back, reading a letter.

"What? The spread of demonic powers? 'Inexplicable circumstances surrounding the numerous, unrelated disappearances _may_ indicate the presence of otherworldly powers operating within the city'!" Saleh read aloud. He vaulted one-handed off his steed and landed in a melodramatically heroic pose. The sage raised a hand and a strong wind rushed down the street, sending his cloak streaming out behind him like a river of emeralds. "Thank the Divine _Light_ you sent for me!"


	2. Lessons In Complicating A Good Thing

**Cascade**

**Chapter Two: Lessons In Complicating A Good Thing**

Amelia tilted her head slightly, but Saleh looked equally ridiculous at forty-five degrees. "Maybe my memory is really confused, but I thought all our insane magic-users in King Ephraim's army were women. Lute, yes, L'Arachel, _very_ yes…" She turned to the red-haired mage, who looked slightly embarrassed. "Did he hit his head on something?"

"Ewan!" Saleh called sharply. "You haven't introduced me to your lovely ladyfriend here. Haven't I taught you anything about priorities?"

"He's a little bit crazy," Ewan admitted.

"Master Saleh," said Amelia, "we've met before. Remember? The Sacred Stones… events? We slew some elderbaels together in Darkling Woods."

"Really? Capital!" Saleh declared, throwing his cloak over one shoulder roguishly and striding down the street to a vegetable stand.

"There was an incident," said Ewan. "Well, not really an incident. More like a hideous side-effect. Remember Lady Myrrh?"

"By reputation, mostly. We didn't talk much," Amelia recalled. She, like the pupil, was watching Saleh juggle cobs of corn. As they flipped through the air, they began to pop, raining fluffy white kernels into a pair of large, borrowed baskets. This 'new' Saleh seemed much more comfortable around strangers than she remembered; he had obtained the basket by commanding the stall-owner's attention and saying "Just need this, won't be a minute."

"She's officially the Great Dragon now, since the old one was killed by the Demon King. The thing is, Morva was a lot older than her, and he had the experience to wipe out plagues of monsters, but Myrrh – well, she still looks and acts twelve," said Ewan, in a half-trance. The popped corn was now leaping in great arcs from basket to basket as Saleh paid for the cobs.

"Myrrh never acted twelve," Amelia stated. That was the first thing everyone knew about her.

"Never sounded it, at least. It's really weird being around her for days at a time, 'cause she'll go from laughing at the cute little rabbits or whatever to telling me about a horde of entombed that burned a city to the ground a thousand years ago and painted murals on the stone pillars with blood," said Ewan. At this point he noticed the look Amelia was giving him, which plainly said that he was never going to be forgiven for this free information.

"We are requested at the Keep, my apprentice!" Saleh called to them, frowning at the slowdown.

"I'll show you the fastest way there," Amelia volunteered loudly, then shifting her voice lower again. "Didn't he notice that he was the one doing street theatre with grain produce a minute ago?"

"Busking with husks? Nah, but that's typical of Master Saleh lately. See, he discovered this ancient ritual, back from the days when everyone on Magvel knew about the dragons and we all worked together to hold back the Demon Armies. Something arcane that would 'bind a human and dragon together, that they might divide harm and multiply strength', I think," Ewan recited, waving for the sage to join him in following Amelia's lead.

"That doesn't work mathematically," the knight pointed out.

"Yeah, that's why it's what we call _ma-gic_," he pronounced slowly. "The whole thing took days. If I ever have to chop mandrake by the light of a half-moon in an easterly wind again, I'll scream. But as near as we can tell, it worked the way we thought it would. Or it's going to. Myrrh's been sleeping in her temple ever since, and Master Saleh has been…"

"Intoxicated," Amelia suggested.

"But with holiness," Ewan added quickly. "He's not dangerous, but his memory… and his personality… and his hand-eye coordination, come to think of it…"

"Has he done anything incredible yet?" she asked. They walked down the street in silence for some time before Amelia noticed the increasingly uncomfortable silence, and Ewan's unyielding, baffled expression, with a dash of accusation thrown in. She recalled the hero-worship that the little mage had for his teacher, and quickly amended her question. "Anything _new_ and incredible, I mean. Kinds of incredible that he couldn't already do."

"…Not really," Ewan admitted. The silence came back, this time awkward. "…I hope it goes away soon. Even if it didn't work."

"Absolutely stellar," Saleh declared, striding confidently behind them. "A truly marvellous structure, fit for kings and common people alike. How many sieges has it withstood to date, young knight?"

"The bakery?" said Amelia, following Saleh's admiring gaze to Johan's Breadsmithy. "Uh… I have no idea. But Grado Keep, which is at the end of the street over _there_" –she pointed, tugging at the sage's sleeve to drag him away from a display of a dozen elevenses– "has been sieged twenty-three times, and King Ephraim is only the second man to succeed."

"Fantastic. Just the place I've been looking for," he told them. "Ewan, I'll need you to familiarise yourself with the city – wander as you wish, but you must return to this place at four o' clock."

"You're sure your meeting with the king will be done then?" Ewan asked.

"No, I want you to get the last batch of fresh cinnamon rolls," Saleh explained, indicating the slate beside the door listing the day's baking schedule. "Bring them to the Keep and we'll have a lesson in aerokinetic conjuration this afternoon."

"Yes sir," Ewan said, triggering the impulse to salute in Amelia's arm. She resisted, and they watched Saleh march toward the front gates of the keep. At one point, he tripped over a carelessly discarded fruit crate, but turned the fall into a graceful cartwheel and continued unruffled.

"Could he do that before?" Amelia asked.

"Probably," said Ewan, glumly.

"It's still a _kind_ of incredible." The mage tried to cheer up, but was clearly unsettled by his teacher's condition. "I'm going shopping. Want to 'familiarise' yourself with the tailoring bazaar?"

"Might as well."

* * *

Paladins didn't get a lot of paperwork. Assigning a knight to a vital task, in Franz's experience, usually consisted of pointing in the right direction and saying "_More_ of them? Don't they ever just fall down and surrender? All right, you take that gate and _hold_ it, we'll call in the mages against this group, and for the Light's sake, try not to _die_ too soon."

It turned out royal clerks had a different method.

So he decided to return to his part of the barracks to deal with the sheaf that they had dropped in his arms, where there would probably be the right kind of quiet. It had been relatively quiet in Ephraim's new throne room, but it was unsettling, as though the air were full of important, volatile thoughts. The entire reconstruction effort was ultimately directed from that room, after all. Coughing at the wrong moment would probably cause flash floods and tectonic catastrophe across southeastern Grado.

His feet took him there of their own accord; Franz was already deep in the chronicle by the time he was ten paces out of the court. Page after page detailed ordinary Grado citizens who had vanished completely, without warning or any trace, and aside from the total mystery, hardly anything seemed to connect the cases. _First disappearance reported by Commander Kyle on autumnal equinox, approximately three weeks (precisely twenty-two days) following ascension of King Ephraim to rule of Grado…_

(That had been a chaotic month, with Frelia, Jehanna, Rausten, and Carcino unanimously calling for Ephraim to take rule of Grado, now that the entire royal family was dead. There had almost been a revolt, until Ephraim had taken the long road between Renais and Grado Keep, through a mountain range, and purged it of a particularly vicious bandit organisation. It was the sort of detour that changed public opinion.)

_Second disappearance reported four days later by Corporal Parker, under similar circumstances. Apparent victim/abductee vanished from home during night, leaving no sign of struggle or altercation._ The clerks had the usual stilted speech that Franz associated with people who wrote for a living, and were therefore totally untrustworthy until you were actually holding a blade to their necks. They had some kind of dark urge to use as many words as possible while saying as little as possible.

_Ninth disappearance… Fourteenth disappearance…_ Franz flipped through the pages with a sort of hopeless intent, wondering how it was possible for anyone to walk down a street anymore and actually make it as far as a shop. None of them had been found, no messages had been left – what use did anyone in the world have for two dozen random citizen of Grado?

He opened the door to his barracks, and asked of anyone hanging about with nothing to do: "What do you suppose the chances are that there's a capable and talented homicidal maniac in the city that we don't know about?"

Two knight recruits looked up from maintaining their armor. As Knight-Sergeant, he was technically their commanding officer, but since he and Amelia were only on loan from Renais for as long as Queen Eirika wished, he tended not to give them specific extra assignments, preferring to leave that sort of thing to Forde and Kyle, who were only too happy.

"Just one?" asked Rob.

"Not likely," Archi added. The two were friends, possibly out of some shared past of misery – one was called Archibald by his parents, and the other Rabbie.

"Dozens upon dozens?"

"Lining the street and all demanding that we stop and solve every problem they've ever had while we're just trying to get our patrol done?"

Rob nodded and returned to the armor plate he had on the floor, a small hammer in hand. "That's more like it. …How is it so bloody easy to dent an ordinary legguard and so hard to get it un-dented again?"

"Hey, captain-man," Archi said, showing Franz about as much deference as he was used to, and about as much as he was comfortable with anyway, since they were barely younger than him. "Can I get the night off? My parents have got some kind of merchant-guild get-together thing, and they want me to help with the preparations – I'm not on picket duty, so I just need you to make sure I stay off."

"You know, when I was your age–" Franz began.

"What, eight months ago? Tell me all about it," Archi said, rolling his eyes.

"When I was your _rank_–" he tried again.

"Weren't you born at his rank?" Rob asked, innocently. "You must have been at least a corporal."

"Okay, okay, whatever, go," said Franz, heading past them and to his own officer's room. "And say hi to Flora the florist's daughter for us, since we all know that if she weren't going you'd be begging me to put you _on_ picket duty."

"Like you're one to talk," Rob remarked. "What's that you've got, your latest sheaf of love poetry from the sergeant?"

"Hey, he can't brag _that_ much. I saw her hanging around Westfen Street with some red-headed guy, looked like mage. They were having a pretty good time," Archi said, having been born with the death-wish that drove him to prod at officers. It would not serve him well if he was ever under Forde's command.

"Ah, shove it, Archi," said Rob.

"Ewan?" Franz asked.

The recruit shrugged. "I didn't hang around long enough to catch names; I was trying to get the patrol done."

"Mm," said Franz, as people have since the beginning of time when something totally innocuous but unexpected happens. It was the sound of a sea captain who's just noticed an iceberg in the distance, but is absolutely, totally, one-hundred-percent certain that there is no way it could possibly collide with them.

But he'll still keep one eye on it.

"What is all that, anyway?" Rob asked, indicating the reports in his hands.

"The glorious badge of the capable officer – paperwork," said Franz. He left the (slightly) younger recruits to their work, dropped the sheaf of pages on his desk, and locked the door for total privacy and quiet. Nothing to distract him from examining every case in intricate detail and find something, some clue, to tie them all together or at least give him some direction. Nothing at all.

"…Ewan," he said again.

* * *

"And you haven't given Franz the other reports?" Saleh asked, in a rare, totally sane moment.

"No," Ephraim admitted. He was pacing again, a hobby he had only taken up since he had also taken up the rule of the Grado Empire. On the plus side, the thick carpets of his royal chambers were the most comfortable material to pace on that the world had ever known. "I want his completely normal opinion of the completely normal facts, and your bizarre occult opinion of the bizarre occult facts."

"That doesn't particularly make sense to me," Saleh admitted. "But neither do waffles, and they certainly have their uses, so we might as well get on with it. Do continue."

"…Of course," said Ephraim, who had caught on to the generalities of the sage's condition, even if he didn't know why that was the fourth time he made mentioned waffles in the last fifteen minutes. "Well, as I said, citizens of Grado are missing and we don't know who's doing it. That's not your job to figure out – I want to know what you think of these sigils we keep finding. They're always there on _something_, wherever someone's disappeared."

Saleh accepted the sketch Ephraim handed him, bowing his head in slight reverence and shaking the king's hand heartily afterwards. "Hmm… very, very interesting… indeed," the sage remarked, looking the curiously twisted shape over.

"Do you recognise any of it?" Ephraim asked, hopefully.

"Oh yes, of course." Saleh noticed the king's intent expression and volunteered what wisdom he could. "This bit here is a spiral, and over here we have some curved cross-hatching, possibly a trio of overlapping Xs, and this big thing around it all is a square interscribed with a circle."

Sage and king watched each other, waiting in quiet incomprehension for someone to speak again.

"…And what does that mean?" Ephraim prompted.

"I have no idea. It hasn't a _thing_ to do with any arcane ritual or sacrifice I know of. …Do you have reason to believe any of the missing people are or aren't dead?"

"I wish I had reason to believe anything," the king grumbled. "As it is, if you don't know what that symbol means, we're all in serious trouble. Sinister magic is never the best way to start a day."

"Don't _despair_ so, my good majestorialityness," said Saleh, turning Ephraim slightly so he could clap him on the back. "Here in Grado, the royal mages have the largest magical library on Magvel – as much as Caer Pelyn tradition avoids books, we have an even older tradition of doing whatever necessary to indiscriminately hammer the enemies of peace into unrecognisable debris. I will begin researching immediately."

* * *

Anyone brave enough to venture into the theatre district of Grado – only a few blocks, but packed with performers – could be assured of not spending a moment with nothing to do. On a slow morning, only two or three different acrobats would be risking massive fire hazards with cannons, flame-breathers, or Act IV, Scene III (in which the castle is burned by raiding hordes).

The risk, of course, was the constant possibility of being pulled in for 'audience participation'. And the mimes. The eternal silence… of the mimes.

"We've got a lot in common, you know," said Ewan, as they watched the troupe form a pyramid in the centre of the plaza.

"You can balance six people on your shoulders too?" Amelia guessed.

"I _mean_ you and me," Ewan said, rolling his eyes. "You, me and Ross were way younger than anyone else in Eirika and Ephraim's army – prodigies, you might say. All incredibly talented, intellectually adept – well, not so much Ross – we both lost our parents years ago and had to grow up on our own…"

"What's your point?" Amelia said, snapping a little more than she meant to.

Ewan recoiled. "Just saying we've got a lot in common." They watched the pyramid implode and leap, like the splash from a boulder hurled into a lake. "It can be a whole 'nother kind of tough, when no one else around you can really understand how tough it already is."

"Thanks for reminding me. Just out of curiosity, how many of the army can you name who have both parents?" she asked. Practically everyone had lost somebody, whether through war or the general unfairness of life. Eirika and Ephraim, Innes and Tana, Joshua, L'Arachel, Ross, Neimi, even Myrrh…

"…I don't know about Lute," Ewan said at last. "Never heard about her losing either one."

"She was raised by wolves, didn't you hear?" Amelia asked jokingly. Ewan gave her a look that said he didn't care for being mocked when he was trying to be serious, and in any case wolf-raised children were significantly more normal than that violet-headed sage. "…Intellectual wolves."

At that, Ewan relented and let out a laugh. "Is it cinnamon roll time yet?"

"Not quite," the recruit replied, reading the nearest clocktower, "but we can start back if you're eager."

"_You there!_"

Amelia suddenly realised that the entire crowd was staring at her, including the leader of the acrobat troupe, who was pointing at her triumphantly. He had been the one to shout as well. "Me here?" she repeated.

"You shall be the Maskéd Lady for our next piece! Please, come up to the stage!" the acrobat called in a ridiculously dramatic voice.

"Oh. Audience participation," she muttered to Ewan. "Can you teleport us? Just a block away would do the trick."

Ewan looked up at her – while Amelia had grown a foot since the Demon King's defeat, the little mage had remained resolutely little – and, with an evil grin, snapped his fingers. "Oh, drat," he said cheerfully. "Doesn't seem to be working today."

Silently promising to make him regret that grin for the rest of his life, Amelia trudged up to join the acrobats, who had added ribbony dancing accessories to their close-fitting outfits, obviously preparing for some kind of modern pseudo-ritualistic rite. Dance these days was getting more creative than was good for it, in Amelia's opinion, but she still took the mask. It didn't look remotely like her, and wouldn't for at least forty years and a debilitating illness, but it _was_ entirely glass-gleaming white with a red symbol painted across the front.

"Awrl righ'," she said, her voice muffled by the mask, "let's get this over with."

* * *

Franz gratefully looked up from his desk when someone knocked at the door; reading about the scene of a crime was exponentially more boring than looking at the actual scene. "Come in," he called, shoving the papers slightly aside – after being given an assignment from the King of Grado, you didn't brush it aside lightly if you were attached to your limbs.

"Hello, sergeant," said Rob. "Making progress?"

"I wouldn't know," Franz replied. "I'll find out when it's all over, I guess."

"Good. …You do know you don't have to worry about what Archi says, don't you?"

Franz grinned. It was cute when fresh recruits tried to counsel their commanding officers. "Yes, Rob. I'm not worried, so you don't need to worry either." _Although it's probably part of why I can't focus on this work._

"I won't," Rob said sincerely. He was being unusually solemn, compared to his regular never-really-seen-what-a-soldier's-last-job-is-about energy. "Sergeant Amelia is crazy for you, everyone knows that."

"Yeah, I picked up on that somewhere along the way too," he agreed, still grinning. "Really, I'm all right, but I'm starting to think that something is bothering _you._"

"You might say that," Rob agreed. "But I'm not concerned for myself. …Don't you ever worry about what will happen tomorrow?"

"Thursday?"

"I'm speaking more generally."

"Well, sure. Everyone does, a little, but I try to keep my attention on today. Not that we ever have trouble with that in a job like soldiering," Franz remarked.

"And now I'm speaking more specifically. About the Knight-Sergeant," Rob hinted. Franz had no idea why he was talking so strangely, but people vented their nervousness in strange ways.

"What about her? Do I worry that she won't l–ike me tomorrow? It's not like flipping a coin, although the King of Jehanna would probably tell you otherwise."

"But in the end, in the _very_ end, it won't make any difference. You can't change life, and life does end. Even if you're the greatest heroes in Magvel's history, even if you survive every battle of your lives and your bond never quavers, one day one of you will die, and you'll be split apart. Forever. No matter how much you want to be together."

"…Rob, you're really starting to creep me out. Has something happened? Maybe to someone in your family?"

The corporal hesitated. "…Something has happened. Nothing has changed." There was an edge to his voice now, somewhere between bitterness and indignant resolve. He kicked the door shut behind him, and whether bizarre luck or something else, Franz couldn't guess, but the lock fell into place as well. "I am the enemy of death," he declared, and leapt at the paladin, hands outstretched.

Franz fell back, instinctively absorbing the impact, but rather than rolling and throwing Rob overhead, he found his back crushed against the edge of his heavy desk. Ignoring that, he tried to brace his legs under himself to push back, but Rob was stronger than Franz remembered, too strong, too determined. Franz wasn't much older or bigger, but paladins too have exceptional strength, and no green recruit should have been able to hold even against his resistance, let alone force his grip inchingly closer.

Shifting tactics, Franz pulled his legs up and let gravity drag him down, twisting as he went to smack Rob's forehead against the solid wood of the desk. That at least stunned him for a moment, and Franz followed with a sharp kick to the abdomen and scrambled for the door. He made it in three steps, and thought he was safe – but that was before factoring in the way the lock had welded itself into a solid mass.

"That's _cheating_," he growled, and got no further before Rob grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around, and shoved him into the door with both hands. One wrapped around his throat, and it took a moment's desperate struggle before Franz realised he wasn't being strangled. Rob's free right hand splayed like a claw, and he pressed it against the paladin's armorless chest.

He didn't understand why until the soldier's fingertips began to dig into his flesh, at which point he followed a very ancient tradition, and screamed.


	3. Third Time Pays For All

**Cascade**

**Chapter Three: Third Time Pays For All**

Like all intelligent people, Amelia was immediately suspicious of street performers. They smiled all the time, and while the obvious explanation was that being cheerful drew an audience, she wondered often enough – when patrol duty required her to pass through that part of the city – if they weren't grinning at a joke that the rest of the populace hadn't caught on to yet, like the fact that they had a job that involved performing the sorts of stunts that usually got you locked up, sometimes in a padded room.

Down the street, someone was putting out the fire-eater for the sixth time that afternoon.

Nevertheless, the white glass mask had a certain tribal nobility to it, with a red emblem splashed across it like that, and fit her head comfortably enough, as it was warmer than glass tended to be. She couldn't see a thing through it, save for a general dark blur that was, she expected, the entire world. Amelia deduced this much from the general light blur above it that was almost definitely the sky.

The only evidence of the dancers was the constant drumming of their feet in a circle, rotating around her in what was no doubt a very artistically expressive ritual of primal release and acknowledgement of the ceremonies of Grado's ancestors. Or a bunch of people in kilts and tights shouting "Alilaialialailia!"

_Maybe there's no difference_, she thought, diplomatically.

_Absolutely_, agreed… Amelia. _It's better than forgetting them entirely. After all, isn't that all that's left? Ruins and relics and things like this are the only things the ancient people of Grado left behind. We have to remember them somehow. Otherwise it would be as though they never existed. If you had a choice, would you want to be lost and forgotten forever, or at least have some fragments of your life remembered by those still to come?_

_…My, I'm philosophical today,_ Amelia noticed, mentally frowning.

_Well, being forgotten is enough to make anyone philosophical. The only thing better than a legacy – however silly it might look – would be to live forever. It's not like that's an option. …But wouldn't it be nice?_

_No kidding,_ she muttered, and the world went black.

After a disorienting moment, Amelia realised that the glass in front of her eyes had gone opaque, and abruptly turned cold, shedding the peculiar warmth it originally held. Those two changes were curious, but not completely worrying – the way it suddenly tightened around her head, pressing so hard that there was no room to breathe, let alone speak, was rather more urgent. She was trapped in crushing, suffocating darkness in the middle of a bright street while fools danced around her.

It wasn't that Amelia didn't panic. It was that she had that gift of multitasking that let her scrabble at the smooth, immovable edges of the mask with all her might, doing her best to keep her heartbeat low so as to save oxygen, at the same _time_ as her mind was shouting _Oh, bloody hell, I'm going to be killed by a prop!_

With no sight to fix her world on, the recruit lost her balance and fell to her knees. The jolt from that impact cut through the fire in her lungs and the ice on her face, and Amelia realised that she wasn't unarmed. She had a hammer the size of a street – the exact size, shape, and colour, in fact. Resigning herself to a killer headache at the least, Amelia bent over fully and struck the mask against the stones. Being the uncooperative type, it didn't fracture, let alone actually smash.

But a moment later hands grabbed Amelia's shoulders and forced her to look up. The cold was eradicated by a sudden, searing heat, and like any stone both frozen and immolated, the mask shattered and fell away. Only once she could see again did Amelia realise that her vision had been going red and black, but the first few desperate gasps cleared that away.

"Amelia! Are you all right?" Ewan asked in a rush, arcane fire still swirling around his left hand.

"Whoa… yeah, thanks," she groaned, raising a hand to her forehead as though that could soothe the terrible pounding in her head. Ice, heat, asphyxiation, and a good bash to the skull; she had developed the Perfect Headache.

"Should I give you mouth-to-mouth?" the mage asked, undeterred.

Amelia didn't even hear him; she was noticing the sticky redness that covered her fingers when she moved her hand from her head. "Oh, by the divine light…" she groaned. "How bad am I cut?"

"You aren't," he replied, looking closely.

"Ewan, it's everywhere and I know the smell. This is blood."

"Sure looks like it, but somehow you got through okay. Erlch," he added, touching her wet, crimson-stained hair. "You'll probably want a bath, though."

With the single-mindedness that tends to grip people in these cases, Amelia pressed on. "Look, if it's not mine, than where did it all come from? You blast someone with lightning?"

"Well… I tried," Ewan admitted. "I'm not that good with lightning yet, though. All the dancers took off, but I think they were as terrified as everyone else when that symbol started glowing."

"Symbol…" she muttered, still trying to clear the fog of near-death. Gingerly, Amelia picked up one of the larger shards of the broken mask, and saw immediately that the sigil painted on it was gone, leaving only shallow marks like acid-etching. "…Get a bag or something; we're taking those pieces back to the castle _now_."

"What about the dancers?" the mage asked.

"If we need them, we'll find them," Amelia stated, forcing herself to her feet. Her gaze swept the plaza, and one by one everyone still nearby met it, uncertainly. "Just to be clear, none of you saw _anything_ until I say you did, got it?"

"Yessir! …Ma'am! …Yes!" said most of them, with about that level of elegance.

* * *

Pressure points. Weak spots. Ultimately, that was what all combat came down to – finding the place where your opponent was weakest and hitting it with a hammer. That only worked if you had a hammer, of course, but sometimes the weak point was small enough that you didn't need much of a weapon at all. Sometimes a fingertip or two would do.

Ordinarily, locked against the wall with Rob's vice-grip around his throat and five spears of unspeakable agony digging into his chest, Franz could understand why his free hands didn't present much of a threat, but if last-chance outbursts weren't something extraordinary, they wouldn't be much use. He struck like a scorpion, two fingers extended, into Rob's windpipe, hooked into the nook of his collarbone and shoved down.

"Whhaaaatt…" Rob hissed, as his knees buckled. He kept his grip on Franz's neck, but the other, more excruciating one withdrew. It wasn't likely that he would get the chance to do that again, and it might have been a wasted effort, but Rob had missed an important detail. Franz was unarmed. He wasn't.

The next few moment were full of incident, mostly because Franz was reluctant to kill even the most evil of his subordinates. So when he yanked Rob's sword from its scabbard, rather than taking his head off from the start, he settled for a light slash to the forearm to weaken his grip before hammering his elbow with the pommel and dealing a pair of blows with the flat of the blade. Even unnatural strength has its limits, and after being slapped with steel for the third time, Rob spun senselessly with the force of the strike and collapsed to the floor.

Franz stayed with him, kneeling on the corporal's arms and bringing the sword down over his neck, point and hilt against the floor so that the blade hovered over him like a guillotine. Technically, Rob was free to move his neck, but only if he wasn't very attached to his head. He wouldn't have been for long, in any case.

"What do you… think you're doing…?" Rob wheezed, still coughing from the first blow to his windpipe.

"I could ask you the same question," Franz countered. "But after that 'enemy of death' bit, I get the feeling you're not really a kid with dreams of knighthood."

"I am trying… to _help_ you," he said, his face contorting briefly into a snarl.

"When I want your help I'll ask for it," Franz snapped. "Now don't try struggling or you'll… oh, screw it, I don't have time to make witty threats. Just don't move, all right?"

"Not much time at all," Rob agreed. "You're losing blood fast, sergeant. How long do you think you can hold me down before you're too weak to put up a fight? Long enough for someone to come looking for you? We're in the recruit barracks in the middle of the day – no one heard you scream, even if it got through the walls."

"What kind of help do you think I need from you?" Franz demanded, ignoring the question. Rob didn't need to know that he was already feeling light-headed.

"The answer to every problem, the end of all fears!" Rob insisted.

"Great. _Death_ really wasn't the answer I was looking for."

"_I am the enemy of death!_" he shouted.

"And what the hell does that mean?" Franz shouted back. A shifting muscle made him glance back, and he saw Rob flexing his hands in preparation for something. "Hey – you stop that right now. Not wanting to kill you and not killing you are two very different things."

"You don't scare me. Nothing scares me."

"Really? 'Cause you twitched the last time I said… death," Franz remarked. "Yup. There it is again."

"I am the _enemy_–"

"I can see this is going to be a bloody spectacular afternoon," the paladin muttered.

* * *

"Really, Amelia, I think you should wash up first," Ewan said again, having to put a skip in his run to match the recruit's determined pace.

"I trained under Sergeant Faval; trust me when I say I've been covered in much worse," she stated, pausing only briefly inside the castle's gates to wonder where Ephraim would be at this hour of the day.

"It's not that you're any less attractive – it's a bit more of a primal thing now, I admit – but you look like a butcher and you smell like a sausage factory," he explained, tactfully. "Why are you in such a _rush_?"

"Because yesterday a fire made threatening shadows at me and today a mask tried to kill me, and I've having a hard time with the idea that this is business as usual in Grado," she replied. "Come on, right after lunch I bet Ephraim's in the gardens; they're on the western wall." Personally, Ewan thought that Master Saleh would make a better advisor in this situation, but since the sage and king were likely to be in the same place, it made little difference.

They ploughed through the middle of the training grounds – "Sorry, sorry, 'scuse me, don't mind her, _watch where you're pointing that!_" – and around the perimeter of a courtyard filled with statuary and an ornamental pond – "See, look, you could just stop for a quick wash right there– oh, fine…" – before arriving in the Grado gardens, which were filled with such powerful aromas that Amelia's miasma of blood and evil was quickly trampled undernose.

"King Ephraim!"

"Master Saleh!"

The lord and sage were startled out of their discussion by the oncoming miniature warriors; Amelia in particular vaulted two hedges and a bench before coming to attention before the king and saluting with manic energy. "Vital information to the safety of the city, milord!" she declared, and thrust the sack out to him.

"By the _Light_, sergeant, how are you still standing?" Ephraim exclaimed.

"Not my blood, milord!"

"She's gone into some kind of adrenaline rush filtered through the Dutiful Knight mindset," Ewan explained. "…Your Majesty," he added, after a pause to see if Saleh would prompt him.

"Sir, I believe Grado is in danger, potentially from a troupe of street performers allied with powerful pyromaniacal shadow spirits. And if mimes are involved, I don't think anyone will be surprised," said Amelia, still proffering the sack full of shards.

Ephraim sighed and tilted his head slightly toward Saleh. "Knight-Sergeant, I understand that you've already encountered the sage today?" Amelia nodded. "And I've been talking with him for the past two hours. Consider very carefully how much more crazy you want to add to my day."

The recruit deflated slightly and lowered the sack. "Yes sir. But the symbol that was on this mask is definitely something out of the ordinary."

"…_Symbol_?" Ephraim and Saleh repeated in unison.

"That's right," Amelia said. "It was painted on the mask – with something's blood, I think – and it looked sort of–"

"Like this," Ephraim finished, producing the copied sketch of the sigil.

There was a silent pause.

"Well, _someone_ has been keeping their vital intelligence all to themselves," Ewan remarked.

"Not at all," the king insisted. "Hasn't Franz told you about the case, yet? I gave it to him before lunch."

"We haven't talked since this morning," Amelia said. "What else do–"

"What, seriously?" Ephraim asked.

"_Yes_," the recruit insisted, giving the king a hassled look. "Is there some kind of law I don't know about? Your entire half of humanity is acting weird just because we're not shackled together or something. Milord."

"I'll ignore that," the king said graciously. "I was just expecting to have heard from him again by now, and I assumed the delay was, ah…"

"My fault," Amelia finished, somewhat sarcastically. "Oh, thank you. Well, if you already knew something arcane was going on, that explains what Saleh is here for, even in his condition. Master Saleh?"

"_Great Light_, where did _you_ come from?" Saleh yelped, leaping back a step from Amelia.

"I've… uh, I've been here this whole time," she told him. "I just wanted to know if you've figured anything out yet."

"Nothing definitive," Saleh admitted. "This is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, lightly toasted on one side and served with a fresh medley of–"

"Well, I'm sure you're doing your best," Ephraim said, cutting him off. "Let's pool everything we know. Ewan, go get Franz while Amelia fills me in on what happened."

"I saw more of it; she was blinded and choking," said Ewan.

"Yes, but he can count on you to bring Franz right back, whereas I have a much higher chance of dragging him off to a secluded corner, et cetera, et cetera," Amelia explained dryly. "His Highness only gets to talk like this when Queen Tana isn't about."

"Look, _one_ of you go right now, by the Warrior King!" Ephraim commanded them. He turned to Saleh. "I hate working with teenagers. If only they weren't so blasted competent."

"Generally, I find it best to work with those several hundred years older than yourself," Saleh advised him. "Ewan, get going."

* * *

Franz was trying to keep himself calm. The calmer he was, the slower his heart would beat, and the slower he would lose blood. Who knew you could gouge like that with ordinary fingers? Rob's nails, under their current coating of dry, browning blood, were quite ordinary, not sharpened into points like some of the more insane bandits were known to do.

"You haven't changed any of what I said," Rob remarked, apparently without a care for the sword edge over his throat. "You haven't even challenged it. You know that I'm right. All of this will end. Everything will end. Even you. Even Amelia."

"You're really getting on my nerves," Franz said, slurring the words more than he would have liked. How much _had_ he lost? "I mean, for the first hour, it was kind of menacing. Now you're jush… just as boring as the duty roster I should be drawing up right now."

"If you had the choice," Rob asked, "who would you rather die first? Yourself, leaving her alone but with the longer life, or Amelia, letting you be with her for as long as anyone could be, but having to survive with her absence afterwards? It's a hideous choice, isn't it?"

"Y'know, I could always just wound _you_," Franz told him. "Not fatally. Just enough to make sure you pass out first, if you're going to insist on this waiting game."

"Don't you wish that you could both just live forever?" Rob suggested.

The room was silent. Even the clock had run down an hour or more ago, and Franz had been rather too occupied to wind it up again.

"That's what you're offering, is it?" Franz asked at last, his breath rasping. "Call me sceptical, but I've heard magic can't do that."

"So short-sighted," Rob said, apparently to himself. "You all just take the first answer you're handed and move on, instead of _thinking_, instead of trying again."

"You can shut the hell up any time," Franz offered. "You know. In case you were wondering."

Rob began another cool-yet-intent tirade on the subject of mortality, but he was interrupted halfway through the second sentence by a knock at the door. "Hey, Franz? Are you in there?" He knew the voice instantly, of course – Ewan. He really was in the city, then. Inside his own head, the paladin slapped himself for _that_ being his first thought, recalling what Archi said about Amelia, rather than 'I'm saved at last'.

Franz and Rob stared at each other in silence, each daring the other to speak first. They both knew, as Franz and Forde taught all their charges, that it took a warrior's mind a fraction of a second to transition between speaking and fighting. Neither one was giving up that advantage. It was down to the crunch now, and the first syllable out of someone's mouth would be a declaration of war.

"If you're getting dressed or something, you can just say so," said Ewan. "Hello-ooo?" The doorknob rattled, but it would do no good; the lock had fused itself just before Rob's attack. Franz intended to get to the bottom of _that_ one immediately, assuming he survived the next few minutes.

"Look, I'll give you _five_ seconds, and then I'm coming in," the mage went on. "One…"

Rob convulsed like a fish given an electric shock, shaking Franz from his seat, yanked one arm free, and shoved Franz's arm up and to the left, putting the blade as far from useful placement as possible. "Two…" Franz leapt back and rolled quickly from his knees to his feet, but the sudden increase in height spread his already-low blood too thinly, and he staggered with light-headedness as everything wavered black.

"Thr– _Fire!_" The lock flashed red in the door for a moment before exploding across the room and leaving blackened fractures in the far wall. Understandably, Rob was startled by the sudden blast, giving Franz a moment to go into a full spin, leading with the pommel of his sword to the younger knight's temple. Rob's head snapped back, directly into a supporting beam in the wall, and he crumpled to the floor.

"…Whoa," said Ewan.

"That looks like a fantastic idea," Franz said, staring blankly at his unconscious enemy, and passed out.

* * *

And the next thing he knew, he was falling off a bed in a random full-body twitch, the sort that usually sneaks up on a person on the verge of drifting off to sleep whether they want to or not. Fortunately, before he was fully over the edge, a strong hand gripped his shoulder and forced Franz back the other way.

"Whoa!" he yelped, half-sitting up before another wave of dizziness dropped him flat again. "It's good, it's good, I'm fine," he assured them, waving his hands to ward off help.

"Actually, you are," agreed Ephraim, standing over him. He nodded toward Saleh, standing on the other side of him and holding a Recover staff the wrong way around. "I didn't know you could lose that much blood without deflating, but apparently it's all back where it's supposed to be, thanks to Saleh. …And Ewan, who apparently noticed the part when he almost filled your veins with syrup."

"It was an honest mistake," Ewan added, leaning in.

"Actually, its higher viscosity would have strengthened your heart–" Saleh began.

"And he'd be dead," the little mage pointed out.

"On the off chance that there's some kind of magical infection that will undo a staff's healing, I'm going to have you bandaged, but I wondered if you could explain this first," said Ephraim, opening the paladin's shirt.

"_Ohh_, that is _ugly_," Ewan said, cringing at the sight of the scars left from the attack.

"It was more gruesome earlier," Saleh remarked.

"Wow," said Amelia. Slowly, all the others turned to look at her. "…What?"

"Why do I suspect that you aren't paying attention to the scars?" Ephraim asked, rhetorically.

Amelia looked from king to sage and back again. "Uh, I'll be…" She pointed to the door. "I'll just wait out there for a minute."

"Now," said Ephraim, when she had gone, "I can't help but notice that these aren't blade wounds, and Rob – he's in a secure dungeon cell, by the way, and still unconscious – had unusually bloody hands when we found you. No matter how I look at it, I put two and two together and come up with disgusting."

"Sounds like your math is right, sir," Franz confirmed.

"Blech. …Call me paranoid, but am I the only one who thinks those marks look familiar?" asked Ephraim. With that, he produced a sketch from his cloak and unrolled it over the prone paladin.

"The mark that was on the mask?" Ewan observed. "What's that got to do with it?"

Ephraim's finger hopped back and forth between scars and sigil. "This part matches the curve here, and this lines up with this crossed bit, and here again, and here…"

"That is the single most hideous thing I have ever seen one person try to do to another," said Saleh. "Mind you, in Caer Pelyn, monsters or not, I've had a relatively sheltered life."

"You're saying," Franz realised, "that Rob was trying to _carve_ some arcane symbol into my chest with his fingers?"

"Succinct," said Ephraim. "Since you are, apparently, in as perfect health as can be expected, I want you and Amelia to go find everything we can about these disappearances and anything else odd happening. And since I can see you're preparing to ask me what the two have in common, just let Saleh bandage you while I explain what _wasn't_ in those reports I gave you earlier."

* * *

"Creepy," Amelia decided, as Franz wrapped up the explanation again. They were standing outside the home of the first reported disappearance, which was even more closed up than the cold, damp weather warranted. "I wouldn't have thought Rob would get mixed up in something like that, either."

"He was talking like a fanatic," said Franz. "I can't imagine what must have happened to him. Maybe Saleh will have answers after some research – all he knows for now is that it's a good thing Rob didn't get to finish his little art project in my flesh."

"I could have told you that much. …So… do we knock again?" asked Amelia. They had been waiting for several minutes since the first knock, and so far there was no hint that anyone was inside.

"I don't think so," said Franz. With the edge of his blade, he pried open the window shutters – nailed down, which seemed excessive even for the previous night's storm – and found that the glass on the inside was, conveniently, already broken. A few moment's work had all the shards out of their way, and the two knights clambered inside without injury.

The room was large, or at least felt like it; in the darkness it was impossible to tell. All the windows were sealed and blocked, except the one they had just come through, which cast only a faint splash of light across the floor. As Franz's eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw the shapes of tables, bookshelves, and an upholstered rocking chair, which was almost never the centerpiece of an evil lair.

"Matches," he muttered. "There are never matches when you need them."

"I've always got some," said Amelia, beginning to rummage in her pockets.

"Pyro."

"Don't you have malignant magical loci to find?"

The paladin made his way carefully into the darkness, wondering what an arcane locus looked like. Most of the furniture looked nearly unused, except for one desk, which was covered in papers – he held one up to the light, and found that it was a journal entry. "I suppose it's too much to hope that the victim was taken in the middle of writing about their day?"

"Wouldn't do any good unless the last thing they wrote was 'Oh, and here's Edward from next door to talk about our next unholy ritual'," Amelia remarked. She finally got a match struck without burning her fingers, and a yellowish flare lit the wall. "Oh… not good."

"What's up?" asked Franz, not looking away from the journal pages. "Hey, this looks important – the stuff this guy wrote sounds a lot like the ranting Rob was doing all afternoon."

"All things end," said Amelia.

"Yeah, pretty much," Franz agreed. "How did you know?"

"It's written on the wall over here in… something that looks a _lot_ like blood."

_Progress will be slow at first,_ Franz read, _but I have faith in the people to recognise a great work for its truth, and quickly come to my same conclusion, that this will be the finest revolution in the history of our people. The early work will go piece by piece, as I work on individuals, but in time the symbol will gain strength and spread on its own into a great cascade... Resistance will be rare and unsuccessful; if the chosen individual is unaware of its presence and meaning, they should have no defence, and will quickly_… He reached the end of the page, and they were so mixed that he couldn't tell which the next one was.

"And over here it says 'They must be made to understand'… This one is 'There can be no end but the end of the end'…" Amelia recited, grabbing a lamp off the shelf as her match threatened to scorch her fingers. "Any of these sounds familiar?" She lit the wick and a warm glow filled the room.

"…Yeah," said Franz, his mouth suddenly very dry. "A bit." Amelia turned at the odd tone in his voice, and followed his gaze to the ceiling, where was written in giant, glistening letters: _I AM THE ENEMY OF DEATH._

* * *

"Anything else with your tea, milady?" the maid asked Tana, curtseying again.

"It's bad enough having to spend so much time in this part of the castle; if I need anything, I'm sure I can manage the journey to the nearest servant without too much trouble," Tana said, feeling mummified in blankets. "Honestly, it's not even that cold, and I feel fine."

"Well, it's the king's orders, milady, we've got to take special care of you," said the maid, pouring the queen a cup and passing it to her.

"It's about time he and I had words about all this. And if that doesn't work, I shall throttle him," said Tana, cheerfully. "…Are these new cups?"

"Aye, just came in from Rausten, milady."

"Strange pattern," she muttered, inspecting the bright red design splashed across its side. "Well, go on, then. I mean, really, what could happen?" Tana asked, raising the cup to drink.


	4. Revolution, Revelation, Restoration

**Cascade**

**Chapter Four: Revolution, Revelation, Restoration**

The words on the ceiling weren't dripping, which both knights presumed they should be thankful for, but the other side of the matter was that the blood – if it wasn't blood, then it was far too much like it for Amelia's tastes – had been there long enough to dry, or at least congeal. Its sickly scent wafted down in the recently-disturbed air like a shower of _blech_. This would make another set of clothes for the fire.

"How is it even possible that no one has noticed this up to now?" Franz asked with skin-crawling exasperation. The words were having an especially bad effect on him – how many times had Rob repeated that phrase in the hours as Franz held him down and waited for help? So he busied himself with the scattered papers instead, stacking them together and stuffing them into a pocket of his satchel.

"In case you haven't noticed, the Grado Military have a few blind spots, thanks to being the biggest army on the continent since the first death of the Demon King. One of them is that not every problem is supposed to be solved by three hundred heavily-armed men storming, conquering, and burning whatever's left to the ground," Amelia remarked. "Though I think King Ephraim's probably putting a stop to that kind of thing. …Are you all right?"

"Oh, yeah," said Franz, reasonably convincing. _It's just that every time I look at you now I realise that no matter what you're eventually going to die, and we're not exactly in the safest line of work._ "I think there's something nagging at me, like some clue that's screaming at us to be noticed."

"I know what you mean. Anything in that report?" Amelia suggested.

"Nope. They came in, there was no one here, but there was a big nasty sigil carved into the back of an armchair. With typical Grado brilliance, it says they took the chair back to the keep."

"I really hope the next house isn't like this one," she muttered, looking the address up. "The next closest is three blocks away; let's get moving. We can always come back later, right?"

"Right," Franz agreed. As she moved for the door, he darted ahead, opened it first, and slipped out into the not-so-sunny street – clouds were gathering again, and Amelia was giving him a strange look. "I'll take the lead, hey?" The Look didn't change. "Well, it's not like I'd trust anyone else to watch our backs."

"Sure," she agreed, and Franz started for the next address, his eyes sweeping the street for potential threats. Amelia glanced once and declared it safely acrobat-free; she was much more concerned with the fragile state of her 'rival's mind. _He's being something again._

* * *

Being the flexible type, Ephraim had admitted that he could get his pacing done anywhere, not just the throne room. So the king stalked up and down aisles of ancient books, the problems of making an empire run properly fitting and locking together in his mind like a jigsaw puzzle with farms and average rainfall. Trying not to be creeped out too much by his aimless prowling, Ewan and Saleh searched tome after tome for something that would give them answers.

Even having the right questions would be a step up.

"Master?" Ewan asked, staggering up to the table with another tower of books.

"Mm?" Saleh intoned.

"What's with the hole in the library ceiling? I looked, and it just kind of keeps on going up."

"That's the belltower," said Saleh, not looking away from his book; possibly in case it tried to bear him down – the tome lay open three feet wide and looked like one of the more predatory volumes.

"But it goes up the centre of the entire tower, and I thought the king's chambers were at the top. Isn't that kind of inconvenient? Like… really loud at three in the morning?" the little mage continued.

"It's not a clocktower, it's a warning system," said Saleh. "If the monarch is attacked in his – or, as has happened occasionally, her – chambers, they can ring the bell and summon all the castle attendants in the entire central keep. I'm not sure why they didn't simply construct collapsible support struts in the corners instead. A simple trick of engineering could have the entire tower folding down to ground level in just a matter of moments, where help would be readily available."

"…Wouldn't everyone who wasn't on the top floor be crushed?"

"Not at all! Sliding walls mechanisms and properly-positioned catapults–"

"I think I liked the waffle fixation better…" Ewan muttered.

Fortunately, Saleh cut himself off at that moment. "Oh, this does look interesting. A combination of rites of invocation, a locus of migration, and marks of spirit that–"

And the sage was in turn cut off again, this time by a scream. It was incredibly loud, echoing around the sadistically-acoustic library until it seemed as though they were surrounded by dozens of terrified voices – all of them female and echoing down the belltower column.

"Tana!" Ephraim yelped from among the shelves, and charged away to the nearest stairs. He didn't notice if the mages followed him, probably didn't even notice the steps flying by four at a time under his feet. The only things on the king's mind were the distance, closing too slowly, between him and the queen, and the desperate shriek for help. So terrified, so enraged, that it hadn't even sounded like Tana…

After climbing stairs for the lifespan of a galaxy, he reached the top level, charged down the hall with Saleh and Ewan dozens of paces behind, and – _wham_ – the door burst open on its own, and an avenging shieldmaiden in a bathrobe stood before him.

"You and me, buster," said Tana, glaring at Ephraim. "We are going to have _words_."

"You're all right!" the king gasped in relief, and tried to embrace her, but the queen was having none of that.

"Of _course_ I'm all right, Ephraim! I've got every possible need attended to except being allowed to do anything that will keep me from getting bored out of my mind, and now the teacups are exploding and the maid's gone berserk and here you come to save the day again! I don't know if I'm irritated that you're being smothering or that you hired a psychotic royal attendant or that you won't let me thrash the psychotic attendant on my own, but one way or another you are in _serious_ trouble!" Tana fumed.

There was a moment of silence while the universe tried to sort this out and Ephraim fumbled for a response. At last he spoke. "I'm so glad we're already married. It makes it much less likely that you're going to leave me to go to Rausten and become a cleric."

Tana cracked half a smile at this, which let Ephraim know that he wasn't going to be executed today, but before he could ask what any of the commotion could have been about, more of it arrived up the stairs. Ewan in particular skidded to a halt and gaped, reducing the overall level of tact in the area by half, as usual.

"Whoa! Tana, you're–" he began

"Choose your last words carefully, Pyrobrat," she warned him. (Far from being an insult, this was the nickname he had earned among the commanders of Ephraim's army after a memorably scorchful incident involving the Jehanna salt plains, six revenants, and a firework soaked in lamp oil.)

"I think 'pregnant' would probably fit nicely, although 'the size of a general in siege armor' would be equally accurate, if less efficiently descriptive," said Saleh. Tana glared at the sage, then her husband, who mouthed the words '_Don't mind him – crazy_' with an accompanying hand signal.

"Fine, yes, you're right, but that doesn't mean anything and I still need to speak with His _Majesty_ here," Tana stated, pulling the robe closed over the bulge in her dress.

"Can you go over the screaming business first?" Ephraim asked. "What exploded? And where's this berserk maid?"

"Lying over there," said Tana, leading the way into the main room. "She attacked me with that serrated breadknife, not that it made for much of a weapon." Immediately Saleh crossed the room to look over this latest unexpected attacker.

"It might have sufficed for carving a sigil," the sage mused. "Or she may have thought you were concealing a large croissant…"

Ephraim looked over the scene, strewn as it was with the blankets Tana had gratefully tossed aside and the remains of several teacups. There weren't any good weapons available. "I don't understand… how did you knock her out?"

"I hit her with a rug." The king stared, making Tana feel something further was expected. "…Rolled up."

_

* * *

Of the things that could possibly be __up,_ Amelia decided, _that I'm dealing with Franz narrows down the options. Could be related to: (1) Renais, royalty and knights thereof, (2) Grado, military and reconstruction thereof, (3) Forde and his many eccentricities, (4) me – probably subcategories there I don't want to get into, and let's not forget (5) missing lunch because he was busy almost getting murdered. Kitchen was serving aloo gobi today. Boy goes mad for curry sometimes._be Amelia decided, 

"House number five," Franz announced. "Windows blocked like all the others, which is making me think all we have to do to find whoever's behind this is look for the guy who really needs some fresh air and sunlight. …Is something wrong?" he asked, indicating that a minor god of irony probably did follow the two of them around all the time. "You just got a weird look on your face."

"The inside of my head sounds like a reconnaissance document and it's starting to creep me out," Amelia replied. "Don't worry about it. We've got bigger issues at hand."

"No kidding," Franz muttered.

"I'm _talking_ about this whole sigil-cult-thing, whatever it is," she said, meaningfully.

"So was I," he insisted.

Amelia flashed a brief grin. "You're a terrible liar," she remarked, and slipped past him to knock at the door. It swung wide with the first rap, unlocked and unlatched, and just as dark inside as the last four houses. From within, the thick curtains glowed vaguely, blocking the last of the afternoon's sunlight. Also like the last houses, this one was undamaged, with no papers strewn about or bloody declarations scrawled across the walls.

"I'm not lying just because I'm thinking about more than one thing at a time," Franz pointed out.

_That's #2 off the list, since this is already Grado we're trying to protect, and #3 was already unlikely, since Forde's having a great time out here. Haven't heard bad news from Renais lately – that's #1 gone – meaning he either really wants a samosa or it's about me again…_

"Except for the first place, none of these houses have had a single thing wrong with them. Is it really worth combing for evidence again? And why is that feeling that we're missing something getting stronger all the time?" He sighed and sat down at the base of a bookcase, rubbing one temple.

"All right, I give up. I'll go for the direct approach: what's bothering you? _Really_ bothering you, Franz. You do… I mean, you do know that it's safe to talk to me." Amelia leaned against the wall on the other side of the room, arms crossed in what she had been told could be a very imposing stance.

"Of course I do," Franz confirmed instantly. His mind silently added _Except about you._

"So what is it? I'm running out of guesses. It wasn't almost getting killed again," she stated.

"No," said the paladin.

"I knew that from the start," Amelia remarked. It was just an offhand remark, an aside. It lodged itself into Franz's thoughts like a flung dagger.

"…You weren't worried?" he asked.

"Well, I didn't really get a chance," said the recruit, surprised by this question. "The first I heard about it was when Ewan showed up shouting for Saleh, and then the two of them practically had you patched up before I had even got that bloodish stuff off from that mask."

"The what?" Franz asked, almost sharply.

"Oh right, you were, uh, busy. It wasn't pleasant; I'll tell you more when we've got time."

"I don't think we've got anything pressing going on right now."

Amelia shrugged. "All right. Around noon I got roped into once of those street performances near the old amphitheatre. Apparently at least one of them was in on this… order or conspiracy, or whatever it is, because the mask they gave me had that sigil on it. Hadn't seen the thing before, so I put it on, it talked in my head about death and legacies for a while, and then it tried to suffocate me. Ewan blew it off; I don't know how. I guess he's got a knack for breaking things. Lucky for me he was there."

Silently, Franz recalled that he _would_ have been there if she hadn't rushed out so quickly that morning. "Yeah, I'm glad too."

"It kind of bled on me, and Ewan wouldn't shut up about how it looked or smelled, so I cleaned up and then hurried over to see what had happened to you. Like I said, not much time to worry."

_Great_, thought Franz. _So I'm practically imploding with concern for her and she's barely noticing that I've been held hostage by a possible cultist murderer in my own room for hours. That's just – the ingratitude – how could she –_

"You're not telling me what's bothering you," Amelia reminded him.

"Hey – I know what wasn't in those reports," said Franz, jumping to his feet. "They had the chair and mentioned some disarray, but there wasn't anything about scattered pages of maniacal ranting or messages on the walls. Not a word. We've got some slacker knights, but I don't think anyone could be _that_ short-sighted."

"That's true. …So someone would have to have written all those things _after_ the first search," said Amelia.

"And that means they could go back, or even still have been there while we were looking."

"I think we run now," Amelia recommended. They did, out into the sunset-lit street, the sky looking injured and enraged in the thickening clouds. The first block went by in silence, before Amelia dared point out again that Franz had dodged the question for the second time.

"Let it wait 'til later; people without magical air supplies probably should probably save it for the things that are important," said Franz.

"This _is_ importa– hold on, magical? Is this about Ewan?" Amelia sighed in relief that it wasn't something worse. As well as their abilities had complemented each other, something had always kept those two from getting along. That she was friend – or something – to both of them had to be awkward.

"…Sort of," Franz admitted.

"All right. If you say it can wait, then it can wait," she relented.

"What? Now it's okay, oh-it's-just-Ewan, and you're willing to let go?"

"I was just scared that it was something – I don't know, something serious."

The clouds, which had closed over the sun as they ran and coated all of Grado in greyish twilight, let loose a sudden blast of thunder that sounded like an explosion being torn in half and thrown down the stairs. It was ominous enough that Amelia almost tripped, wondering if one of those irony gods that Forde was always going on about had decided to make its presence known.

"Serious?" Franz repeated as they rounded the last corner. _You get to tell me what's serious, now?_

"Yes. I'm not trying to pry, Franz." Amelia nodded at the boarded house, the empty streets around them. "Might want to get your sword out. Just in case."

"Absolutely, Knight-Sergeant," said the paladin. Amelia paused, not sure what to ask to figure out everything he meant with those words. Franz just nodded at the door, his sword already out and gleaming, and so Amelia opened it, one hand ready to draw her lance from its armor-holster.

"…Doesn't look like anything," said Amelia, stepping into the gloom within. Franz almost relaxed; they hadn't barely avoided a trap of any kind this afternoon, and no one had been lying in wait… And then he heard muffled words from Amelia and she came backing out of the door twice as fast, followed by a broadsword that put its wielder a safe several feet away.

The man was nothing remarkable, not anyone Franz even vaguely recognised. He supposed this was more support for the theory that most atrocities were committed by fairly ordinary people. Nevertheless, Franz was able to aim a good amount of fury at the man within the first few seconds of meeting in him; waving sharp objects at Amelia was not an acceptable hobby.

"I thought you'd be back sooner or later," said the stranger. "Don't worry, this is just a bit of insurance for myself. I'm not interested in fighting either of you."

"I'm not interested in fighting you either," said Franz. "Beating you senseless is another matter."

"Why won't you _listen_ to any of us?" he demanded. "You must realise by now that we're right."

"Skip it," Amelia advised him. "I've already heard the story from Franz."

"Mm. Do you hear _that_?" the man asked, pointing up, nowhere in particular. The knights listened more carefully, and heard faint tapping sounds against stone… but it hadn't begun raining. They looked down the street in both directions and saw the source – sources, rather, dozens of them. From either side came a wall of marching grey-black ghouls. Skeletons. Armed skeletons. Lots of them.

"All right, so you have a small army of the undead," said Franz. "Summoned?"

"Convinced," said the stranger.

"You must be a hell of a salesman," Amelia remarked.

"Anything must be better than turning to dust in the ground, mustn't it? They'll feel better once we can restore their old, flesh-and-blood forms…"

"Those are _people_?" Franz realised, with a lurch. The two skeleton formations had come to a halt fifty feet apart, with Franz and Amelia in the middle. They were plainly there to barricade the street, and they were irritatingly good at it.

"They were, and now they are again, thanks to us. It's all been staring you in the face; I'm amazed you haven't caught on yet. The enemy of death," said the stranger.

"They look pretty dead to me," said Amelia, a slight shake in her voice. "Trust me, as a soldier, I'm pretty much an expert on this sort of thing."

"Think about opposites and you'll understand soon enough. Only you're both so _resistant_ to the idea, refusing to let the mark take its course. I'm beginning to think we should just kill you and start fresh, so to speak."

Both Franz and Amelia had nothing to say to that, though they shifted to be more back-to-back, each facing down a small battalion of the walking dead. Perhaps feeling that more was expected of them, the clouds began to rain, quickly turning the cobblestones slick and gleaming.

"I'd recommend against rushing inside any of these houses around you; you'll find the people living in there aren't feeling welcoming tonight. Don't stress yourselves too much. After all, it'll just be like going to sleep…" said the stranger, as he made his way toward the skeleton barrier to the west.

"Only you don't wake up," Franz reminded him.

The man paused and flashed a grin over his shoulder. "You might find that things have changed, there." The skeletons parted to let him through, and quickly closed the gap again. The rain-blurred air was tense, as imminent combat always made it.

"Any secrets you feel like declaring before we get too busy?" Amelia asked, trying to sound light.

"Don't know. You'd have to tell _me_ if they were anything serious," Franz replied.

"_What?_"

Inside Franz's head, his thoughts railed against him. _That's it? You're facing hideous odds and that's the sort of thing you want to be saying to Amelia? Smooth and cool as flipping ice, you are._ "…I'm sorry."

"It's going to take a little more explanation than that," Amelia bit out. The skeletons had rallied by now, and came at them in a staggered charge, weapons waving and jaws clattering, otherwise perfectly silent. Amelia smote the first one with the heavy spike of her lance, smashing a good deal of it, but as the others closed in and she began to parry their attacks, the weapon became less effective.

"What else do you want me to say? You already heard – it's about Ewan and… and you not really caring. That's all there is," said Franz, trying to put the hammering flat of his blade to work wherever possible.

"Not caring? And what _about_ Ewan, if he's bothering you so much?" Amelia demanded. "Switch!" Franz turned and bent, letting Amelia roll back-to-back over him and slam her lance down on another foe as he literally disarmed another just above the elbows.

"It's like you're just not interested sometimes – like I'm there and you're happy, but then you go off somewhere else and I'm left behind… like there's nothing here that's special to you. Like I'm just anyone else," said Franz, parrying an axe blow so that it lodged in the ribcage of another ancient skeleton.

"I don't know why you'd feel like that," said Amelia, silently interrogating herself for any time that she had ever felt Franz was ordinary, right back to the first time he came charging up to her out of a cloud of dust in Port Kiris.

"It's how you act," said Franz. "I don't know what's going on in your head."

"Well _thank you_ Lieutenant-Commander Obvious!" Amelia growled as she deflected an unexpected thrust away from her face – of course, having it land in her shoulder was only so much of an improvement. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm sort of busy most days!"

"I'm just saying that's where Ewan comes in," said Franz, already bleeding from a pair of long, shallow wounds down one leg. "I mean, you drop me for him, and then – then the whole day is just Ewan, Ewan, more Ewan, magical Ewan."

"You were kind of busy yourself," said Amelia. "And I didn't _drop_ you for him, I was just out there and he happened to go by."

"Real convenient for him," Franz observed.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Amelia asked, knocking aside a lance much like her own and taking advantage of the clear space to body-check the nearest skeleton, who slipped on the wet stones and spread a ripple of tumbling through the slowly thinning crowd.

"You're too smart not to have noticed by now!"

"Oh, all _right_, so he thinks I'm cute or whatever, but that's no reason to assume sinister plans," she insisted.

"I know it isn't," said Franz, batting aside far too many oncoming swords at once. "I mean, it's not like I don't want you–"

"…_What_?" Amelia demanded. With a great sweep she knocked the oncoming skeletons back and then turned to Franz, her face set and eyes deadly serious.

"Um…" said Franz, his jaw shaking only partly from the cold rain. "What I mean…"

"Oh, I think I know very well what you _mean_," Amelia growled, smashing down the first skeleton to come at her from behind. Most of those she had knocked back were keeping their distance, not sure what to make of it when their opponent turned her back on the battle, and it was confusing Franz's foes enough that they were backing off slightly as well. "I think I can figure out what _want_ means pretty fast."

"That wasn't – I wasn't thinking about what I was saying," said Franz, taking advantage of the fewer foes to try to get breath properly back in his lungs. "I would never try – I mean, even if you _wanted_ to I wouldn't – and I would _never_ try to pressure you–"

Amelia put her lance through another skeleton's skull impatiently. "As much as this sounds important, I'd really like to know what this is all about, Franz. What could ever make you think anything like _any_ of that?" He didn't answer, focusing instead on cleaving apart one more attacker. "I love you."

With _that_ he stopped, not seeming to know if he wanted to meet Amelia's gaze or not. Even the undead looked like this wasn't the battle they had expected, walking in. "…You've never said that before."

There was a silence, curiously full of the sounds of storm and combat. "…You know, I didn't know that?" said Amelia. _What about the – no, not then. And the – that time when–_ "You're right."

"I know."

"I love you," she said again. "…Does that change anything?"

Franz thought for a moment. "Well, it – _down!_" Amelia dropped at his warning, giving Franz a clear space to bisect the skeleton that had finally come up behind her, and then she was rising again like a righteous firework, smashing apart one of the walking dead in a single long sweep. Franz duelled another one carrying a giant maul, Amelia letting just enough of them past her for the paladin to parry his enemy's blows into eradicating the skeletons. Another four lay broken by the time the maul-wielder realised it was doing more harm than good, at which point the tip of Franz's blade slid in under its chin and levered its head off its shoulders like a bottle-cap.

And then, after that and much more like it, the creatures were nothing but wreckage around them, and in the centre stood the Sword and the Shield, neither willing to let the other out of their arms. They said nothing for a long time, still trying to catch up with a few of the most intense minutes of their life. Eventually Franz asked: "Do you know the story about the bird in the hall?"

"Don't think so," said Amelia. She was focused on the slow massage of the rain on her shoulders.

"It's supposed to be a metaphor for life. A bird flies through a window, out of the night and into a huge hall where people are celebrating, and it has just a few moments in the light and the music before it flies out again into the night, whatever that might be," he explained.

"In other words, life is short. Are you trying to talk me into–"

"No. But when I think about you, when I imagine how easy it would be to lose you, I think about what it would be like to be the bird and _know_ that you've got your moments of glory, but then screw up somehow and have all the lights go out. What it would be like to keep on living, knowing what you could have had and somehow lost."

"I'm not as easy to lose as you seem to think," said Amelia. "…Oh, jeez, I'm sorry. I was assuming you meant me."

"Of course I mean you. I love you." He closed his eyes and held her tighter again.

"Franz, ordinarily I'd be able to pick up on something like this, but it's hard to tell in the rain, so… are you crying?"

The paladin's eyes snapped open, but they weren't focused on her or anything else except the inside of his own head. "I've got it. …We have to get back to the castle. Oh, those _idiots_. I've got it!"


	5. Things Fall Apart

**Cascade**

**Chapter Five: Things Fall Apart**

The pounding on the door wasn't getting louder or harder, but with his back braced against it, almost able to feel the intense gazes of the seven or eight knights on the other side, Ephraim couldn't think of any gate, portal, or any entryway of any kind that he had ever wanted to open _less_. The other doors into the royal library were securely locked, but this one was the public entrance, and had idiotically – in Ephraim's opinion – not been built with eight locking bars on the inside and huge serrated spikes on the other. _Thump, thump thump…_

"I could help take some of the pressure–" Tana volunteered again.

"No, no, this is easy, don't strain yourself," said Ephraim, finding it easy to fake nonchalance. "The corridor is too small for all of them to apply force properly; you know it doesn't work if you try to press against someone's back while _they're_ pushing on a door."

"Not really," said Tana. "You had the military lessons, remember? I had to endure hours of needlework and that sort of thing until I could talk Innes into letting me join him for some… what did I have to call it… 'emergency self-protection' classes. _And_ I had to run away to join the army."

_…Thump, thump, thump…_

"_That_ I know perfectly well," said Ephraim, remembering his shock at seeing Tana appear on the battlefield out of nowhere, in Pegasus knight's armor. "One more thing Innes will never forgive me for."

"Well, it was that or blame Eirika," Tana remarked. "Saleh, anything coming yet?"

"I'm afraid progress has become somewhat slowed," the sage replied, his voice coming from among stacks of books, through which they could see Ewan's flame-red hair even in the darkness. "I can't see."

"Light a lamp, perhaps?" said Ephraim. "I realise that asking a mage for fire in a library is somewhat insane, but given the circumstances…" The knights on the other side of the door continued to pound at it in an implacable rhythm.

"That wouldn't help, King Ephraim. I mean I've gone blind."

_…Thump, Thump…_ The king and queen were silent for a moment.

"Ewan, he hasn't got a bag over his head or something, has he?" Ephraim asked, hopefully.

"No, sir, I'm having to read everything to him," said Ewan. "His eyes are still all right, so we're hoping it goes away soon. But we're no further ahead from hours ago."

"Well, what _do_ you know?" Tana asked, knowing that Ephraim shared her sentiment that Saleh's blindness was about appropriate to the course of their day so far. Particularly since this hit to the sage's fighting prowess, in his current state of bonkersdom, wasn't much of a loss.

"I vote that we just let them work–" Ephraim began.

"I'm sure you do, but as two-thirds of the royal family, my votes beat yours," Tana neatly cut him off.

"_This_ is why I was keeping you safe in the royal keep, you realise," said Ephraim, sighing with his entire body. _…Thump, thump, thump…_

"Start talking, Saleh," said Tana, neatly skewering Ephraim on the end of a Look that made it exceptionally clear that she had her own views of 'safety in the royal keep'.

"The sigil is definitely an arcane beacon of some design, meant to funnel power into this world from another realm of existence. It specifies location, purpose, filters energy, and is generally very direct and demanding about what it wants. But whoever wrote the first one was a genius, because they didn't just find it, they _invented_ it. I have no earthly idea what it actually does, any more than walruses know what a Frelian gumbo-sieve is for."

"What in the name of the Divine _Light_ is a walrus?" Ephraim snapped.

"Just hold the door with your superhuman strength and leave this to me, dear," said Tana. "Do you know how to stop it? Block it? Dispel it? _Anything?_"

"The simple solution would be to erase the symbol," said Saleh. "As is the case with most simple solutions, I believe that any such attempt would be a spectacular failure."

"And what do you mean, 'the first one'? Wouldn't they have to write all of them?" Tana went on.

"Oh, no, those curvy bits in the lower right quadrant clearly indicate that it's meant to become self-replicating, once it gains enough strength. A bit like rolling a snowball down the peak of a mountain and watching it obliterate several villages with an avalanche at the bottom," the sage went on.

"Your analogies are just the _best_." _…Thump, thump, thump…_

* * *

The two knights sprinted down the city's streets at full charge, desperate to reach the castle before anything could go wrong there, and it was quite some time before either one of them noticed that every block was deserted, even moreso than the rain would make likely. Franz, of course, had the salvation of the kingdom on those few parts of his mind that weren't utterly stuck on his companion, and Amelia was trying to get him to stop and speak.

"You know, it would improve our chances of getting the message to Ephraim if you would _tell_ me what it is," she pointed out.

"Can't stop, not enough time to explain it all twice," Franz insisted.

"What? Why? What's the deadline?"

"Dunno, just guessing," he stated, still staring straight ahead. "Apocalyptic danger. You know."

"And where _is_ everyone?" Amelia wondered, finally deciding that the empty streets were more than coincidence.

"How do you run and talk at the same time?" Franz asked, mildly exasperated.

"I don't have quite your obsession with platemail," she said briefly. "You know, it's really just a tease to shout that you understand what's going on and then _charge_–"

Franz skidded to a halt, spun, pulled the recruit close, and kissed her before she had decided how to finish her sentence. In the moments after they parted, Amelia noticed a strange, searching worry in Franz's eyes, as though he was waiting to see if she would transform into something else, but when no such conversion took place, he just said "Trust me. We need to hurry."

"…One of these days that's going to stop working."

"What a terrifying thought."

"Just run, will you? I can already tell that if we find out why everyone's inside in the next few minutes, we'll really, really regret it," Amelia said, urging Franz toward Grado Keep again.

* * *

"So eventually the sigil won't even need people to keep drawing it in order for it to gain power," Tana said, summarizing a ten-minute explanation from Saleh that had featured three unrelated references to ice-fishing. "It'll just spread on its own?"

"Demonic possession as plague," said Ephraim. "Interesting."

"We have no reason to believe any demons are involved at all. Have you found anything more, Ewan?" asked Saleh.

"I'm reading as fast as I can," Ewan insisted. "And that doesn't count having to translate most of these words into proper non-bloody-ancient spelling. When 'this' is 'thysse' and 'said' is 'spakenned', light reading stops being quite so light."

"We can switch if you want. I'll read, you hold the door," said Ephraim. He was obviously starting to sweat, his blue hair sticking to his forehead fractionally more with every shudder of the door in its frame. "We at least have lances in here, right?"

"I tried," said Tana, "but you insisted that I not do any heavy lifting."

"Oh," was all Ephraim said. He set his feet again on the stone, trying to get comfortable, and stretching his arms out to either side as far as he could. His fingers just barely hooked around the edges of the stone frame, giving the king a fraction more leverage. It would probably keep them safe another few minutes, but he knew that demon-possessed people – if that's what these were – were notorious for not ever tiring, whereas he had been awake for almost twenty-four hours already.

_...Thump, thump, thump…_

The unfortunate fact was that eventually they were going to break through, and he would stand unarmed as the only obstacle between more than half a dozen knights and his wife, their future child, a brilliant sage, and a brat who deserved to annoy the world for another ninety years. So much for it being good to be king.

"That pounding is giving me an atrocious headache," said Tana, striding away from the group. "Look, that's it. I mean, really, _priorities_, people." Distantly, Ephraim heard a sound like a cascade of blankets tumbling into a pile, and a moment later several long, metal poles clattered at his feet. Tana stood over them, looking much more determined than he felt.

"Curtain rods? I don't–"

"Doing what I say _now_, your advice on the hopeless situation _later_," said Tana.

"I've read a great deal about this," said Saleh, helpfully. "Hormonal imbalance."

"Good lord, is that it?" asked Ephraim. "Franz, Amelia, Her Majesty the Queen – yes, I think that means _everyone_ who drives me insane is being befuddled by hormones."

"Done?" asked Tana, apparently trying to decide if either end of her improvised weapon was sharper. "Good. Ewan, get over here and be ready to blast things. Ready, and… now!" Ephraim leapt away from the door, rolling to his feet again with a lance in hand and ready to face however many foes were to be brought against them.

Naturally, the door didn't open right away, although the sounds of thumping continued. The king and queen shared a glance, and Ephraim cautiously levered the door open with his 'lance'. Both doors were quickly opened the rest of the way by one of the knights, although by the way he was flying through the air and applying all the force with his head, Ephraim quickly formulated a theory that said he didn't want to.

"King Ephraim!" Duessel roared from the corridor, surrounded by knights and handing out disciplined thrashings with the kind of jolly generosity usually only seen during festive seasons. "Excellent to find you standing, sire! Deal with this one, would you?" With that, the greatknight smacked one of his foes toward Ephraim with the wide flat of his axe, and spun to smite another one with his shield.

Obligingly, Ephraim brought the rod down on the stunned knight, who quickly righted himself and rushed Tana with terrible ferocity. This was only the last in a long line of mistakes, as she parried his blow with one twist, smashed him aside with another, and _then_ Ephraim set into him.

The battle didn't last much longer, with both Ephraim and Tana taking the fiendishly determined knights down one by one as Duessel supplied them. The only real moment of tension was when the greatknight found himself caught between two talented wielders of silver blades, and although he was only able to keep one busy, the other had only enough time to take aim at the folds between his armor plates before Ewan sent him singed and rolling back down the hall.

"To business, then," said Duessel, when every knight was lying unconscious on the stone floor. "Purely out of curiosity, I have to ask if everyone in the entire world has gone utterly mad, or just me."

"It's everyone else, don't worry. You don't seem surprised that we were fighting Grado soldiers," said Ephraim.

"Oh, I was, I was. The _first_ time. The next four skirmishes rather wore the sheen off that shock. Now I just want to know what's been happening to my men. They're still fighting with as much talent as I trained them to have, and I'm sure that doesn't happen with hypnotism or mind control or any of those ridiculous practices."

"As a practitioner of arts that you apparently consider ridiculous," said Saleh sternly, stepping out of the shadows, "I feel that I should point out that _vests do not have sleeves_."

Duessel regarded Saleh calmly for a moment, then turned to Ewan. "And you want to be a wizard when you grow up, do you?"

"It'll be years before Master Saleh lets me try anything that has a chance of melting my brain," Ewan said, and Ephraim was certain he sounded slightly disappointed.

"Why is it that I keep having to remind people: _priorities!_" said Tana.

"Quite so," Duessel agreed. "Who do we have to axe?"

"That's a bit of a violent leap, isn't it?" asked Tana.

"Not really," said Duessel. "Hardly anyone is able to harness this kind of incredible dark power and then give it up without at least an exorcism. And the benefit there is that people hardly ever die of axe injuries before the exorcism."

"True," the queen agreed. "But we still don't know what's happened, or where anyone else is – Franz and Amelia could be anywhere, if they haven't been cursed or captured or killed. We'll need a miracle to get anywhere from here."

"_I can see again!_" Saleh declared, blinking rapidly. "Agh… and my eyes have dried out. Ouch."

"…A better miracle than that," Ephraim amended.

"KingEphraimI'vegotitI'vegotitI'vegotit!" Two figures had just burst out of the stairwell down the hall, one in spring green and the other blood red, still charging at full speed.

"It's true," said Amelia. "I still haven't heard what it _is_, but after that armoured knight we had to use to vault over the main gates, it had better be good."

"Well, don't pause for effect," said Ephraim. "What do you know that we haven't figured out?"

"The enemy of death, that's what they keep saying they are," said Franz, possibly unaware that he had just run a mile. "And that doesn't make any sense when it seems like they're all trying to kill us, does it? Only they're not trying to kill us, they're trying to _keep_ us from ever dying."

Ephraim's eyes flickered to Amelia. "Has he been getting enough oxygen?"

"No, it _does_ make sense," Franz insisted. "The only reason people die is that they start out _living_. If you're not alive, then you can't die. Death isn't the _opposite_ of life, it's the _absence_ of it. So the enemy of death isn't life. It's _undeath_. The undead don't ever die."

"Is he making sense yet?" Ewan asked. "I can't tell."

"We did just fight a small horde of skeletons," Amelia admitted. "But how does that make sense? If people were just turning undead, why would they go all freaky-culty?"

"Because you can't make a person undead," said Saleh. "The soul prevents it. A body inhabited by a spirit will always eventually wear out. Undeath replaces the living spirit with a wraith. In skeletons, there's nothing to tell them apart, but if a wraith inhabits a living body, it takes on all of that person's attributes and personality."

"And that exact-copy-of-a-person will never actually die," said Ephraim. "Aside from actually being a hideous mockery of life, at least. …It sounds like conjecture, but I'm inclined to think you're onto something."

"It does match what we know about the sigil," Saleh agreed. "It would try to coerce the… _infected_ person to let it work, because that would make its work much easier. Then connect to an astral realm, beckon the wraith, drive out the spirit, and bind the two together. Neat and unspeakably evil."

"Excellent. How do we proceed, King Ephraim?" asked Duessel.

"Cure the city, destroy the sigil's power, and axe the person responsible," he said firmly.

"Oh, oh! Put me on the third team," said Tana, waving her hand in the air.

"…Don't you get to decide that sort of thing yourself, as queen?" Franz asked.

"You're seventeen years old with a shocking lack of facial hair; _do_ not tell a grown woman how to organise battle strategy," she snapped back, adding "He gets the sigil-destroying job" with a jerk of her thumb. "Now, finding the person responsible sounds straightforward, but I'm terrified of what we'll have to go through to get answers out of Saleh."

"If I've read this properly, and I have, despite the ridiculous faces that squirrel on your shoulder keeps making at me, the sigil will likely attempt to take material form," said Saleh, arching his eyebrows. "An artefact of sufficient dark power, ideally a weapon, brought to consecrated ground where undeath has nevertheless taken hold, and it would have few difficulties, but finding both the object and place would be excessively difficult–"

"Oh. Divine. Light," said Duessel, slowly. He then snapped upright and saluted sharply. "My Liege, I request permission to take command of this particular objective _immediately_ before we all get lanced in the face, and authority to recruit as needed."

"Done," said Ephraim, who could tell when Duessel knew something he didn't.

"Excellent. Franz, you're with me, and I'd like magical support as well – you, boy, what's your name?" asked the greatknight.

"Ewan."

" 'Brat' for short," Ephraim recommended.

"Quickly, now, before our job gets any harder," he insisted, and ran for the door with great galloping strides. Ewan sprinted to catch up, leaving only Franz half-hopping in their wake.

"Wait, I mean, where do you – what about Amelia?" he protested.

"I shall require her assistance," said Saleh, waving the young paladin away.

"I–" Amelia began, raising her arm to reach Franz's way, but she caught herself before she could say anything that Ephraim would doubtless refer to as unprofessional. He left her with a glance that combined his disappointment in leaving her behind and a sort of radiant affection that still left her feeling off-balance. When her thoughts finally broke away from wondering what to make of their last conversation, during the battle in the streets, she saw Saleh holding a slice of bread between herself and the door Franz had just vanished through.

"Drat," the sage remarked. "I was certain it would toast."

"Thank you, I feel much better now," Amelia said sarcastically. "What could you possibly need specifically _my_ help with, anyway?"

"You're a girl," Saleh replied.

"You have three seconds to make that sound better."

* * *

"Oh, _wonderful_! Absolutely fantastic! I'm _definitely_ glad you picked me over, say, any other female in the world!" Amelia shouted over the roar of the chill wind and rain. Her arms were wrapped tight around the neck of Tana's Pegasus, Achaeus, and he was obviously having a much better time than she was, flapping swiftly and joyfully through the storm.

"It is a known fact that Pegasi refuse to fly unless carrying at least one woman," said Saleh, calmly. "And Princess Tana will be much more effective alongside Ephraim, her own preferences for hunting villains aside."

"So I'm a useful gender _and_ I'd be useless anywhere else. No wonder you're still single," she muttered.

"Speaking of which, it would seem that something significant is afoot for you and Sir Franz–"

"Just tell me if I fly off course," said Amelia, cutting him off. "I know you said you want to get to the southern coast, but once we're there, I'll need directions to that cove you mentioned."

Obligingly, Saleh sunk into silence again, leaving Amelia to soak in the rain, shiver in her armor, and try to figure out what could possibly be going through Franz's head. She knew he wasn't what anyone would call ordinary, but there were times when it was as if a hose got out of control in his brain, and what words got washed out into the open were anyone's guess.

"What do you suppose the chances are of being struck by lightning up here?" Saleh asked.

There was a pause. "…Eight, nine, _ten_," Amelia counted quietly. It hadn't helped. "_Lightning?_ As long as I'm the one flying this horse – have I mentioned I don't like horses _or_ flying? Anyway, how about you do whatever magical thing we need to avoid being blasted into crispy bacon?"

"Oh, gladly, although that will take time out of preparing to harness the Pure-Form Fourth Element to rescue us all from a plague of living undeath," said Saleh, impervious to Amelia's patience, which had burned up over the course of the day like flash paper in a blast furnace. "…It is _far_ too hot up here."

* * *

Tana leaned into Ephraim's side and held him close as they walked quietly down the main hall of Grado Keep. Scattered soldiers who had been unfortunate enough to encounter Duessel, Franz, or Amelia on their way to the library were lying about the room. The sigil-curse might have been spreading to people at random now, permeating the city without needing to be drawn, but at least the new 'recruits' weren't as tough as the first ones, and as easy as ever to knock senseless.

"I'm so glad we're getting to spend some time together doing something we both enjoy," said Tana. "Just you, me, Siegmund, Vidofnir, and man hiding somewhere in this city who desperately needs an indiscriminate thrashing. It's so pure."

"No excessive risks, all right? I need to be able to count on whoever's got my back, so I can't ask you not to fight, but you've got someone else to protect, too," said Ephraim, frowning.

Tana gave him a Look through narrowed eyes, glanced down at her belly, and back up again. "Gosh. I had forgotten."

"All right, don't go berserker on me again. We have to think about this logically. The questions are: what kind of person would invent a plague of undeath to try to make the world immortal, where would they hide once it got going and people found out, and do you want the right or the left?" asked Ephraim.

"Oh, the left, definitely," Tana replied.

As one, they spun apart, hefting their legendary lances into basic guarding position, and lashed out with a synchronised pommel-smash at the pale soldiers attempting to creep up behind them. While their eyes alone were freakish with both pupils as wide as possible, like holes into an abyss, their complete lack of interest in the metal poles slamming into their ribs was much worse.

"No pain," said Ephraim. "They're not just the riffraff they let in these days, but actual living-undead."

"Well, the people who get into a big thing early usually get the best out of it," said Tana, trying to keep up her faltering confidence. So far she had only fought one of these wraiths-in-human-clothing, and it had been controlling a maid who was not at the peak of human physical prowess. Plus she had been armed with a carpet, which can be a great comfort.

Of course, a glance to her side at Ephraim was also a great comfort, especially since he was the sort of fighter who sometimes went into fits of giggles before battle, astonished at the idiocy of anyone challenging him to combat. The difficult with _these_ enemies was that Ephraim and Tana wanted to avoid killing them, but they couldn't be easily knocked unconscious or driven back by fear of harm. They wouldn't notice pain until they lost the third limb.

The king struck first, warding his foe off with a thrust from Siegmund, and the knight leaned away from it appropriately, but as Tana expected, it was just the setup for a spinning approach that came in from the opposite side while the knight was still off-balance. When not meant to kill, the lances they both favoured were effectively just metal staves, and Tana took advantage of this with an equally sudden rush against her opponent, planting Vidofnir on the floor and using it to vault feet-first into the hesitating knight.

She and Ephraim consistently drove the attacking knights back across the entire hall, and it was only when the first adrenaline rush wore off that Tana thought to ask why their opponents were putting up so little resistance – and it was at that moment when the other three rush Ephraim from behind, one grabbing each arm and a third slapping a cloth over his face.

Tana quickly set about bashing them to the floor, but when the cloth fell away, it left behind a mark. These knights had though ahead about how difficult it was to draw on a warrior king, and had realised that, if placed backwards onto a kerchief, even a very complex blood-drawing could be stamped onto any unsuspecting bystander.

The sigil glistened a sticky red on Ephraim's forehead, and his eyes rolled back under his lids as he collapsed.

* * *

"Some of us can't take steps four at a time, you know!" Ewan called up the stairwell.

"And some of us don't have magical powers," Franz replied over his shoulder. "Give yourself some wings of living fire or whatever – you do not keep the Obsidian waiting."

"Franz, where are you?" Duessel called from even farther above.

"On my way!" Franz yelped, and redoubled his pace. Duessel just shook his head and continued his desperate charge, but some old instinct knew it was already much too late. There were times when you could outrun the enemy, but that usually depended on knowing where they were going to go _before_ they did, and this time he was late, far too late, far too late…

"_Cormag_!" Duessel roared, grabbing the doorframe as he passed and using it to swing himself inside the wyvern knight's quarters. The room looked as though an entire barbarian horde had spent a week ransacking it, and belatedly Duessel saw the date-marker on the door, reminding him that Cormag had been on a training mission with the Frelian Pegasus knights for two weeks already.

"Whoa… I always thought Sir Cormag would be a neat-freak," said Franz, staring at the chaos within.

"Ordinarily, you'd be right," Duessel explained. "But they already have it – the dark lance, the one I gave him for safekeeping, the one that drove Valter mad…"

"Out on a limb here, but how much driving could that possibly take?" Ewan muttered.

"We will need wyverns, torches, shadowkiller swords, and fiendcleaver axes," said Duessel. "Immediately."

"I don't think I can fit the wyverns in _any_ of my satchels," said Franz. "The rest we can handle. Where are we going?"

"Where else? Lagdou."


	6. Echoes of Dragonkind

**Cascade**

**Chapter Six: Echoes of Dragonkind**

Ephraim cringed, gasped, twitched, and generally looked like a man trying to knot his own feet around his neck. The sigil seemed insignificant at first, unremarkable, until it melted and began to flow into the lines of his skin like a bloody web. He would never tell anyone what the experience was like, what voice he heard in his head, what he saw drawn on the insides of his eyelids.

As the sigil did its work, Tana wasn't idle, but sheer terror at what might happen if Saleh was wrong shook her focus. Instead, she struck savagely at all four attackers with the Frelian techniques designed for knights impossibly outnumbered. Trying not to remember that the style was officially called 'the Suicide Sequence', the queen centred herself and lashed out with a spinning attack that ricocheted off their helmets in a symphonic storm of metallic hammering.

The burst of beatings only lasted for a moment, otherwise she'd have gotten dizzy and collapsed on her ensorcelled husband's legs, but it startled even the calm, drone-minded knights for long enough that Tana was able to fling Vidofnir at two of them sideways with some force, hoof a third in what would at least be called a vulnerable spot, and go for the last one's throat. She tackled the knight to the floor in a clatter of armor and barely resisted the urge to choke the undeath out of him.

With acrobatic agility typical of Pegasus knights – less frequently the pregnant ones, but this was Tana, after all – she leapt up to face the knight who had suffered the least harm from her lance-fling and, bracing herself within and without for the worst that could yet come, slapped him. This was not an impetuous strike, the act of someone in such emotional turmoil that her thoughts had scattered like a catastrophic spill in a marble factory. This was a firm-footed backhand that looked like it could fell oak trees.

Nevertheless, the queen was surprised at the flash of light that sprayed from the impact, like a burst of liquid diamonds in the air that caught the torch-glow before dissolving into nothing. It was almost as dramatic as the effect Tana's touch had on the slavish knight, namely laying him out flat on the floor without so much as a murmur of protest more.

"Oh," she said, blinking in nonplussed surprise. "I guess Saleh was right about the teacups."

The three standing knights watched Tana cautiously as she moved quickly to Ephraim and kneeled at his side. His first convulsions had given way to subtler shaking and sickly paleness, and he gave no indication that he sensed Tana's presence. She gripped his hand, which steadied it but drove the other into wild flailing, and whispered soothingly to him. The king merely rocked from side to side, as though trying to shake the sigil off his forehead.

Admitting to herself that it had to be impossible to make his condition any worse, Tana pressed her fingers against the red stain of a mark, and was immensely gratified to see the blood-like liquid burst like a bubble, leaving behind only a trace of ash on his skin. Ephraim lay still at last, but too still, not even breathing. Shocked by the lack of life in him, Tana found she had to fight off a sudden, visceral choke. Instead she bent further down and blew the dark dust away – and Ephraim's arm darted up to bring her the rest of the distance for a kiss.

…

A long one, given the circumstances.

…

_Eventually_ the bit about being surrounded by their enemies registered in both king and queen's heads again, and they parted, if only enough to be able to speak. "What was that?" asked Tana, smiling.

"Instinct," Ephraim replied.

"Your instincts really are the best."

Ephraim swung his legs up, used his back as a springboard, and leapt to his feet again, though the pose was slightly tarnished when he had to look around and duck again to retrieve Siegmund. It was worth it to see two of the knights re-evaluate their chances against the king's legendary lance and charge away into the castle's corridors. The third one brought his axe up to a guarding position as he backed away, still uncertain of what had just happened.

Tana struck first with an upward thrust that started low and to the side. He parried it as expected, but the twirl with which he did so brought his axe back around to block Ephraim's attack as well, and even left the king open to a killer downward sweep, forcing him to back off. Of course, while Ephraim was backing off, Siegmund needed to do no such thing. The king withdrew, the lance shot ahead, and its razor edge carved neatly into the knight's armor before searing with holy fire.

Again the queen came to the rescue – given the chance, the lance would simply burn until anything evil touching it was dead. So Ephraim didn't run his opponent through, but merely scorched him long enough to hold the knight's attention, long enough for Tana to step in and deliver a resounding slap. She seemed to strike with the force of a ram, and he fell back off the spear-tip, unconscious.

"Healing _and_ exorcising," Ephraim observed. "Quite the polymath, you are."

"I'm just glad that it healed you," said Tana. "…Even when crazy, Saleh knows his magical properties. Did anyone ever tell _you_ that the life-building power of pregnancy was a natural anti-undeath force? Because they didn't tell me. That's something everyone should be taught."

"_I'm_ glad that it didn't blow me into a thousand ceramic shards," said Ephraim. "That was a little risky, wasn't it?" He prodded the prone knight with his boot.

"Well, I figured special rules would apply to you," Tana explained as they continued for the main entrance. "You're the father, after all."

"Oh, really? Good." _Whack_. "Ow! All right, all right, deserved. Where's that map?"

* * *

By now, though none of them were in a position to measure it, the sigil was exerting influence over the whole of Grado Keep and all of its surrounding towns. It didn't have control over everyone – only those who had the sigil on them, in some form or another, were becoming undead. Peace fell over the rest of the affected, coaxing them to stay inside, stay together, and wait. The ultimate peace, as many had claimed over the centuries, was death, and it appeared to be in a generous mood tonight.

The people of Grado waited, and where individuals were able to resist, the others around them had only to hold them still, whisper to them the things they wanted to hear, and let the magic take hold of them again. Willpower meant little to anyone, and where it was significant, the resistant few were tremendously outnumbered.

Flying over the quiet kingdom, Franz wondered why they weren't being affected the same way, and said as much at some point to Ewan, whose magical education led him to postulate that Franz should keep his eyes on the wyvern so they landed in the terrifying monster-crammed ruins safely and without being eaten by their steed. If he were omniscient, he might have been helpful enough to note that no one ever caught the same cold twice; having fought off the sigil once, they were immune.

"How long will we be flying, General?" Franz called to the lead wyvern. The Obsidian hadn't pulled too far ahead, to make sure he would hear his impractically young lieutenants if necessary. He looked back over his shoulder, his face as hard as his namesake, and equally dark.

"Until the end of the world, give or take an hour," Duessel estimated.

* * *

"Doesn't look that special," Amelia remarked, taking in the coastline with a critical eye. "I mean, what, you've got rocks, water, sand, grass – nothing out of the ordinary. Oh, right." She looked up, nearly drowned, and fell to coughing as she tried to wipe her eyes clear. "Also, torrential rain."

"Yes!" Saleh confirmed. "Perfect, perfect, all of it! Well, not the wyvern riders coming in from the northeast, especially since they all have the undeath-sign splashed across their shields, but the rest of it is perfect!" At that, Amelia whirled to face the northeastern sky, but in the storm she couldn't make out anything. When lightning flashed, she got a hint that maybe there was something out there, but tiny details like 'sigil on the shield' or 'gigantic wyvern' were impossible to make out.

"Let me guess; you've gone from blind to telescope-vision," she said.

"Could be, could be something like that. Now, this will take some considerable… power… power…" As she watched, Saleh staggered and nearly fell over his own cape. "Power… power not mine, it's not mine to use, can't have it, can't control it, too much light at once, so much I can't see the shadows to know where the world is, it's too much, too hot–" The sage crumpled to the ground, and Amelia rushed to his side.

"What's wrong? You don't get to fall apart at a time like this!" Amelia protested. What had he said before? Or maybe it was Ewan – one of them had said that Saleh tried to perform some sort of unifying ritual with Myrrh, and this was the result. Well, eccentricity was one thing, but this was the sort of hiccup in plans that would lead to both of them being shredded by wyvern knights.

"Too much, it's not mine, I can't, it'll burn me…"

"Make sense, man!" the soldier shouted, but Saleh was huddling in the rain now, his cloak pulled tight around him. "Whatever you think the problem is, can it wait until _after_ we save the world? I'm sure Myrrh won't mind you… doing whatever it is you need to do!" Hmm. That was probably a lot _like_ encouragement, only useless, and the wyverns wouldn't take long to find them. "Okay. On your feet."

"Mine is, mine is, mine is," Saleh repeated endlessly as she hauled him up by his shoulders and tried to help him stand. Actual walking was out of the question, but he was able to stumble in generally the same direction she dragged. Further along the coast, broken stone pillars had a vaguely carved look that said 'abandoned coastal fortress' to Amelia's military mind, and that was the best they had on hand.

The rain was loud enough on the coast – with the roar of the surf as a backup chorus – that the wyverns' wingbeats were drowned out; Amelia's first hint that they had caught up was a break in the storm as the dragonkin flew overhead. She did her best not to break her stride, which didn't quite make up for Saleh, who was entirely break with occasional patches of stride. By the time they stumbled inside the weathered stone gate, they had certainly been spotted.

"I don't suppose you can tell if we know any of those riders?" she asked.

"Mine is, mine is, mine is but it isn't mine can't touch it too hot too hot _too hot!_" Saleh chanted mindlessly.

"How can you be hot in this weather?" Amelia demanded. It was a rhetorical question; she didn't care. The doorway was high but still too narrow for a wyvern to walk in, which meant as soon as the riders landed and settled their beasts, she would only be facing five-undead-to-one-mortal odds against armoured lancers.

And then, for whatever reason, they didn't come. At first Amelia thought it was just her imagination, stretching out the moment before the impending battle, but they really weren't coming. She knew better than to assume good luck, or that the riders hadn't seen them run inside. Expecting death from above at any moment, she gently shoved Saleh into a corner and crept out. The ground just outside the door was strewn with broken rocks, perhaps pieces from the building carved by the slow chisel of the sea wind.

From behind parts of this wreckage, she spotted the gathered wyverns on the beach. There was some kind of commotion in their midst; between the flaring wings she couldn't spot its cause at first. Then she spotted him – one of the riders had dismounted, and his wyvern had gone berserk immediately. Amelia recalled vague stories, from Frelia and Grado, that wyverns and pegasi were distant relatives, and both shared their ancestral draconian hatred for unliving forces.

The others' mounts weren't fighting, and Amelia puzzled over this as fast as possible. The sigil was made for humans, according to Saleh's mutterings, but if it was gaining power, maybe it could overpower the wyverns' straightforward hunter minds, too. So as long as the sigil-bearing riders maintained contact, they kept the wyverns docile. If they let go, the beasts turned on them.

"Any ideas how we can use this?" asked Amelia. "Without getting savaged, I mean."

"The dance to the drumbeats of the blood in your ears and your heart is a dirge of ruin and a rhythm that keeps us alive and tells of red swans swimming on a lake of tears. They move with grace and fluid hope no matter the chaos around them, a perfect sculpted beauty that can break your arm with a flap of one wing."

"Really? Fantastic. Sit down before you hurt yourself."

"Here they come."

The lucidity of this startled her, and Amelia turned to glance out the door. The riders had given up on dismounting, and were instead approaching the fort by wing. "Oh, sure, when it's _bad_ news…"

* * *

Duessel led them to ground in the middle of Lagdou's surface ruins; Franz and Ewan weren't certain that charging into a known nest of hateful aberrations was the best plan the Obsidian had ever formed, but fanged terrors failed to charge from every corner. Although the destruction of the majority of the Sacred Stones had weakened Magvel's defence against monsters, L'Arachel and Joshua had led more than one demon-hunt into Lagdou over the last two years. Rausten and Jehanna's combined might had slain countless monsters and driven the remainder deep underground.

"Where to now, sir?" asked Franz.

"Deep underground," said Duessel. "How well do you know the catacombs, Sir Franz?"

"I didn't pay a lot of attention when Ephraim made his raid during the war," the paladin admitted.

"Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!" Ewan exclaimed, leaping off the wyvern with his hand in the air. The general and knight exchanged a look. "What? I know this place like the back of my hand. Saleh has a bunch of maps that were made by Morva when he was Great Dragon, just after the first war wiped out the city."

"Excellent. I suspect we'll all – them and us – be looking for a major altar of some kind, something appropriate for dark rituals. My knowledge of the ruins is similarly shaky past the second subterranean level," said Duessel.

"Well, there was the Court of the Blood-Red Moon, about four levels down," said Ewan, concentrating on the remembered maps. "I think the people of Lagdou used to execute monsters there as part of their holy rituals."

"Simultaneously justified and deeply disturbing," the greatknight remarked. "Good work, boy. Follow me." Franz raised a critical eyebrow at Ewan; the boy responded by sticking his tongue out in smug victory. "I heard that," Duessel warned. Ewan nearly jumped; Franz shifted to a smirk. "And that."

"Moving, sir!" Franz confirmed, and pursued the Obsidian at doubletime. Ewan scrambled not to be left behind.

Despite the overgrowth that now covered most of the broken stone walls, it wasn't hard to navigate Lagdou, and Duessel quickly found the main entrance to the catacombs. Outside, night had long since fallen, and the moment they turned the first corner into the tunnels, the trio was enveloped in absolute darkness. "Stop," Duessel whispered. "Just listen."

At first, Franz experimented with opening and closing his eyes, but once he had determined that there was truly no difference, he did as ordered. He could hear the wind blowing outside, the occasional ghostly whistle when it breezed through the right sort of gap in the stones. Coming from the darkness ahead, there were no echoes of motion or footsteps, although somewhere water might have been dripping.

"I don't hear anything," he murmured.

"Which likely means it's safe to press on. Don't forget that sometimes being blind can be helpful. Seeing blinds us to things that need to be obvious."

"Um… right," Franz agreed.

The greatknight smiled. "Never mind. Hold this for me," he said, dropping a brightlance into Franz's hands. "But don't use it."

"…Don't use the weapon designed and blessed specifically for the slaying of demons?" Franz repeated. Duessel nodded. "I guess I never liked lances much anyway," he said, and slid it into the straps on his back.

"You, boy, the same," said Duessel, tossing a sack into Ewan's hands. "In fact, don't even open it." Ewan was bright enough not to comment, but he was pretty sure the mystery object was a book, and it felt slippery with magic under his fingers. "Now, move as quickly as possible while remaining quiet. I didn't see any other wyverns in the area while we were in the air, and that could mean that we got here first, but I find it much more likely that our quarry has already descended and allowed his mount to escape. We would do well to close the distance."

* * *

The wyverns were crowding around the door, but Amelia still had a good lance in hand, and the portal wasn't large enough for them to rush through. Any tentative attempt to clamber inside was quickly deterred by a meaningful stab, and while she didn't like harming any of the bewitched attackers, their collective yelps on contact suggested she was causing the sigil-mind a lot of pain.

"Saleh?" she called, after a long lull in the assault. "Feeling sane yet?"

"I think in rhyme and speak in music, inspiration comes to me in pairs, in couples, in the sea of the sky and the rain under the land."

"That's super."

"I see the way to restoration, but first the land must be cleansed, rinsed, scrubbed clean like the white tuxedo shirt of freedom stained by the red wine of fear and hatred draped over the washing board of justice."

"Get away?"

Saleh stepped toward the doorway, letting the flash of lightning outside illuminate him. "I _will_ be that washing board."

Amelia nearly choked laughing, but she was interrupted only a few seconds later by a sudden intrusion. The wyvern riders were circling the weathered fort, and now through the windows they flung wood and kindling, dead fuel from anywhere nearby. With the storm raging, it was much too damp to burn properly, but that was all the more useful, as the drowned wood immediately began issuing thick smoke and an acrid stench.

"They're trying to smoke us out," Amelia remarked for the sake of the sage.

"Smoking is a terrible habit and entirely inappropriate to polite society."

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

"I recommend developing an insatiable hunger for fish-shaped cheese crackers, but I'll have to invent them first." Saleh said this even as Amelia reversed her grip on her lance, slid her other arm under the sage's shoulders, stumbled through the thickening smoke, and attempted to force him through the largest fracture at the far side of the fort. Now that they were being driven out, the riders had stopped trying to get in the main entrance, and with the smoke billowing they hopefully wouldn't be able to see what she was doing…

…Of course, a moment's longer thought would have reminded Amelia that the riders had thrown in the smouldering wood from every direction they could, including the same fissure she was scrambling through now. That explained why the first sight Amelia caught as she blinked the smoke out of her eyes was Saleh trapped under a wyvern's foot. The second was a serrated lance approaching at high speed.

She parried it into the ground, freed her lance with a twirl, and drove upward at the cursed rider – at least, where the rider probably was, more or less, given that clouds of smoke were boiling from the hole in the stone behind her. Amelia had misjudged the distance and instead tangled her lance in the wyvern's barding, so that, when the rider hauled back to dislodge his weapon from the earth, she was pulled along. In fact, with an extra shove of effort at the last moment, Amelia boosted herself off the ground.

Her trajectory wasn't planned or remotely controlled, so her lance was wrenched from her grasp as she flipped headfirst through the air, but landing feetfirst on the rider's shoulders was well worth it. Keeping her balance was out of the question, so Amelia fell backwards to sit on the back of the wyvern's long neck, grabbed its reins, and yanked hard. Obediently, the wyvern kneeled and raised its haunches to aid a dismounting rider, thoroughly unaware that dismounting was the last thing this one wanted to do. Amelia cared for his wishes about as much as she cared for pickled carrots.

She hated pickled carrots.

Her foe was firmly seated, but vulnerable with his saddle at such an angle. Amelia grabbed his lance before it could be shoved in her face, locked her arms around it with desperate firmness, and let herself fall off the wyvern's neck. The sudden force levered the rider out of place and they tumbled to the wet, sandy ground. Amelia landed badly, but rolled and got to her feet quickly with only a few painful cringes. The knight, impassively malicious and driven by magic, hadn't even noticed the impact, and was all set to run her through with a mighty thrust when his wyvern stomped him.

"Thanks," she said to the drake, nodding appreciatively and taking up the dropped lance. The wyvern paid her no interest, instead backing up toward the fort wall and screeching fiercely. Amelia groaned and turned around; in the blitz of combat, the other riders had surrounded her completely.

"This appears inconsistent with your plans," Saleh remarked, still nearly facedown on the ground with drake-talon gouges all around him.

"_My_ plans? What part of any of this is supposed to be about _my_ plans? I'm supposed to be out here helping _you_ save Grado!" Amelia snapped at him. Most of the riders were still keeping their distance, for whatever reason, but one approached through the rain, his wyvern stalking slowly and purposefully. Gripping a sword firmly in one hand, the rider raised a staff in the other, and a faint blue shaft gleamed in the air – his wyvern collapsed onto the sand, forced to slumber.

Another thing Amelia detested was people who couldn't make up their minds between martial weaponry and magic, and so cheated by using both. The rider dismounted, with his beast safely pacified, and cast the staff aside to draw another. This he waved in her direction, and Amelia braced herself for the battle of willpower that it would take to fight whatever spell was coming. Instead, the Torch staff glowed like an ember, and a witchfire sparked in the air in spite of the storm, illuminating the hopeless battlefield.

"Not again!" Saleh screamed, and scrambled to get away from the hovering beacon. "Why do you demand it, demand the searing in my blood and the hunger creeping through my soul? I don't _want_ it all, it's too much, take it back, let me go, it's not mine!"

"Could you just get a hold of yourself?" Amelia asked. _Oh, Light, I refuse to die in a stupid place like this…_ She rushed the rider before he could try something unpleasant like a Berserk staff on the other wyvern. There was always a chance that they'd only come at her one or two at a time, and if the wyvern was willing to do some instinctive undead-biting at key moments – good lord, this rider knew how to fight.

She started with a straight-on thrust that would only have worked on a panicked foe anyway, spun with his parry to slam the haft of her lance into the rider's side, backstepped into a guarding stance, and began deflecting a storm of steely blows that rained down nearly as fast as the thunderclouds above. It was hard to believe there was only one sword coming at her; Amelia could have sworn that by the time she had even blocked one swing, it was halfway through a cutting arc from another angle completely.

"Mine is, mine is, mine is…" Saleh was back to muttering, as if the recruit needed another annoyance at a time like this.

"Hey, look," she bit out as the relentless slashes drove her slowly backwards, "at this point, I could not possibly care less whether the thing is yours or not. If it's any use right now, just _borrow_ whatever you're raving about and get to work! I'm kind of counting on you, here!"

"Mine is, mine is…"

"I'm not the only one, you know!" Amelia shouted, because any sort of roaring had the same effects as a battle cry, and it wasn't as if her enemy was paying attention to anything but his assault. "King Ephraim sent you, trusted you; Ewan's probably as doomed as anyone else if you don't get a grip – probably all of Magvel with them! What about your home? What about _Myrrh_?"

"Mine is, mine... Mine _is_…"

The rider seemed to be settling into a routine, and Amelia couldn't blame him; with a sword arm that fast, most opponents wouldn't be able to find an opening if he gave them a map and a head start. But she wasn't most opponents, and he took a little longer on the curve with every second backhand-recoil. There it was, and again, and this time she'd–

Take a boot to the gut as he instead slapped her lance down, spun, and kicked out hard. Before Amelia had even hit the ground he rushed ahead, sword raised for an execution-cleave, and at that signal the other riders leapt onto the attack. She had never seen so many fangs coming at her at once.

"_Mine is the fire in the heart of the dragon under the holy sky! Forblaze!_"

A globe of raging light in Saleh's hand turned into a fiery hurricane, a blazing rain fell from the ground and erupted from the earth, though it thoughtfully left Amelia and the wyverns unscathed. Their riders, however, cried out with hideously monstrous voices.

"I'm sorry!" Saleh bellowed over the furious roar of flames. "I can't save you; it's too late for that! All I can give you is freedom…" The sage faltered as his spell of wrath ended. The riders had been uniformly consumed by fiery light and reduced to ash. Their wyverns were only lightly singed; dragon blood made them nearly immune to the legendary flame.

Amelia swayed slightly even once she had regained her feet. "You… Saleh, you burned…"

"It's done," he said, and even through her shock she noticed that a steady serenity had returned to his voice. "Sorry I've been useless for so long; the process of uniting my powers with Lady Myrrh's was more… demanding than I expected."

"…Dragonfire," Amelia observed. In some places, the wet sand had been blasted into twisted flowers of glass.

"The very purest," Saleh confirmed. "That's only the beginning. Thank you for guarding me this long."

"You're awfully polite for someone who just incinerated–"

"I didn't want to!" the sage protested. "The sigil had already taken them too fully; it's gaining power fast now. All I could do was break the bond and destroy the beasts that had replaced them. Now I've got to get to work, or the same will happen to everyone in Grado. Go. I can take care of the rest here."

"I should bloody well think you can," said Amelia. The rain still hissed and steamed where it struck the ground around them. "Am I really that useless again now?"

"Good grief, you overreact. I thought you'd want to leave. This sense in my head – well, I only heard Lady Myrrh describe the Demon King, so I can't compare, but the darkness emanating from Lagdou is the most abhorrent void–"

"Franz," Amelia breathed, and ran for the wyvern she had freed first.

"Quite," Saleh muttered. "So fly fast–" he waved his hand and the winged creature seemed to surge with strength "–and make sure that what I'm doing here isn't undone by morning." He raised his voice for the last part, but Amelia still couldn't hear him. She was already in the air.

* * *

The royal couple walked hand in hand through the empty streets of Grado's capital. Occasionally they had glanced in through windows and seen the residents sitting motionless, staring at nothing, radiating a sense of deep patience. When it quickly became clear that no ordinary force could rouse them, they stopped looking. End of days or not, a stroll at night was a stroll at night, and the stars were out.

"I am so glad that storm shifted south," Tana remarked. "All we need for this to be a perfect night out would be an archvillain to pound into the paving stones."

"I can't think why I didn't notice sooner that you're perfect," said Ephraim. In his other hand, Siegmund was humming a low tone, like a cat growling at a lurking threat, and occasionally sparking from its blade, very much unlike a cat. "Hold on, do you hear that?"

They paused, and in the dark stillness an echoing melody was drifting across the city. "Sounds almost like a hymn," said Tana. "Are we anywhere near the cathedral?"

"Cathedral!" Ephraim exclaimed. "Good one, yes. It's a couple of blocks that way. Blessed sanctuary; now _that's_ the place to be when a curse of undeath is sweeping the city."

"Really? You don't think it's sort of ominous that everyone in the city is completely bound by a demonic stupor but they're having a hauntingly lovely singalong at the cathedral at three in the morning?"

Wearing an expression of serious contemplation, Ephraim looked in turn at Siegmund, Vidofnir, and Tana's fingers entwined with his. "…Nope," he determined.

" 'Kay."


End file.
